Rainmaker
Harper's Magazine
© Davide Monteleone
Davide Monteleone photographed How to Change the Weather, a story by Wyatt Williams that investigates humanity’s long and uneasy desire to control the sky. Moving from conspiracy-driven acts of sabotage in Oklahoma City to contemporary climate-tech ventures in California, the piece traces a broad history of weather modification, from myth and military experiments to today’s planetary-scale climate crisis. Monteleone’s images approach the subject as both a technological frontier and a cultural anxiety, visualising the fragile boundary between scientific ambition, environmental uncertainty, and the consequences of human intervention.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
Secret of Mummies
National Geographic
© Davide Monteleone
Davide Monteleone photographed a story on the Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano, one of the world’s leading centres for the scientific analysis of ancient human remains. The assignment follows researchers as they use DNA sequencing, microbiology, CT scans, and biomolecular analysis to extract new information from mummies, preserved organs, and ancient paleofeces, including material connected to Otzi the Iceman and Iron Age miners from Hallstatt. The work reveals how today’s scientific imaging and genetic tools are transforming mummies from archaeological curiosities into highly complex archives of diet, disease, migration, and everyday life.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
Alps Voting
National Geographic© Davide Monteleone
Davide Monteleone documented Switzerland’s system of direct democracy through the Landsgemeinde gatherings in the canton of Glarus. The story examines a political model in which citizens continue to participate directly in public decision-making, voting on laws and civic matters through centuries- old democratic practices. Set against the Alpine landscape and the ritual choreography of collective assembly, the project reflects on participation, stability, and civic responsibility at a time when representative democracies around the world are under pressure. Text by Nadia Beard.
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Orb
TIME Magazine
© Davide MonteleoneDavide Monteleone photographed the production and global deployment of Worldcoin’s Orb, a biometric device developed by Tools for Humanity to verify human identity through iris scans in the age of artificial intelligence. The assignment follows the device from its production line to its public rollout, moving across contexts that range from cautious optimism in Seoul to the high-stakes launch in the United States. The project explores the tensions between technological innovation, privacy, digital identity, and control, asking what it means to prove one’s humanity through a machine.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
The Art of Hollywood
© Julia Fullerton-Batten
2026
Before green screens.
Before pixels replaced paint.
There was an illusion, made by hand.
At a time when the movie industry is ruled by digital perfection, I turn my camera toward what came before: a Hollywood built on canvas, pigment, and the invisible labour of master painters who created entire worlds behind the actors.
I travelled to Los Angeles to stand before these monumental, long-forgotten backdrops, survivors of another era. Once central to cinematic storytelling, they now linger in silence. By entering these painted spaces, I reanimate them, staging new narratives that resonate with the films we thought we knew, yet remember only in fragments.
The Art of Hollywood is a return to the age of hand-painted film posters, images that promised everything in a single frame: love, danger, glamour, escape. Borrowing their visual language, I construct carefully choreographed scenes in which reality and illusion collapse into a single image.
This work is not a homage.
It is a confrontation.
A dialogue between analogue craftsmanship and contemporary vision.
Between memory and reinvention.
Hollywood, once painted.
Hollywood, remembered.
Hollywood, reimagined.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
Before green screens.
Before pixels replaced paint.
There was an illusion, made by hand.
At a time when the movie industry is ruled by digital perfection, I turn my camera toward what came before: a Hollywood built on canvas, pigment, and the invisible labour of master painters who created entire worlds behind the actors.
I travelled to Los Angeles to stand before these monumental, long-forgotten backdrops, survivors of another era. Once central to cinematic storytelling, they now linger in silence. By entering these painted spaces, I reanimate them, staging new narratives that resonate with the films we thought we knew, yet remember only in fragments.
The Art of Hollywood is a return to the age of hand-painted film posters, images that promised everything in a single frame: love, danger, glamour, escape. Borrowing their visual language, I construct carefully choreographed scenes in which reality and illusion collapse into a single image.
This work is not a homage.
It is a confrontation.
A dialogue between analogue craftsmanship and contemporary vision.
Between memory and reinvention.
Hollywood, once painted.
Hollywood, remembered.
Hollywood, reimagined.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
InstituteTM (collectively Institute Pictures, Institute Studios, & Institute Artist) is redefining how stories are produced and told in the 21st Century. Founded by Producer Frank Evers and Director/Visual Artist Lauren Greenfield, we are a multiplatform production company representing auteur-driven storytellers across commercials, photography, fine art, film, and technology — and producing original work across every screen that those stories live on. Our multiplatform expertise and established global relationships in entertainment, commercial, fine art, and journalism create unmatched reach and cross-pollination of creative work. A film commission informs a photography campaign; a fine art practice shapes a commercial; an editorial relationship opens a documentary. Few companies operate fluently across all of these worlds. Institute was built this way from the ground up.
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