Background
He was born on November 10, 1960, in Santo Domingo, of Cuban and Italian background.
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Manuello Paganelli
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In the late 1970s he attended Southern Adventist University, where he majored in biology and chemistry to pursue a career in medicine.
Career
He spent his childhood attending schools in Santo Domingo, Italy and Puerto Rico. During his last year of college, after purchasing a camera, he read a magazine article about Ansel Adams. He dialed information for Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and called Adams cold.
The friendship and mentoring from Adams guided and motivated him until Adams died.
A few weeks later during the summer of 1983 he got his first break, at the Chattanooga Times. The next year he was part of the International Olympic Press Pool covering the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Los Angeles
In 1985 Paganelli moved to Washington, District of Columbia, to work for Agence France Presse. After working there for seven months, and tired of the poor treatment given to photographers at that news agency, he decided never again to work for another organization as a staff photographer.
As he began a freelance career, his regular clients included the Washington Post, United States of America Today, and Reuters.
A couple years later he added magazines to his clietele, starting with Forbes. Since then his photos have appeared on the covers and inside pages of Sports Illustrated, Life, Time, People, Newsweek, Business Week, Bloomberg, Der Stern, Der Spiegel, Entertainment Weekly, Vibe, and Readers Digest. One of the highlights of his career is a photograph he took of Cal Ripken Junior after he broke Lou Gehrig"s record for the most consecutive games played which became the cover for Sports Illustrated in 1995.
In the summer of 2011 one of his images was selected for exhibition in the Art of Photography Show in San Diego.
On the summer of 2012 Paganelli was invited for a photo show in Street St. Petersburg, Russia, of his Black Cowboys documentary at the prestigious Manege Museum during the Photo Vernissage 2012. He also gave a few television and radios interviews to Russian stations.
In addition to his work for magazines and advertising, Paganelli has also engaged in various independent projects. Cuba documentary
In the late 1980s he was one of the few United States photographers to visit Cuba.
This work culminated in his first exhibit in 1995, which earned him a fellowship award from the Virginia Commission for the Arts.
Frank Van Riper reviewed the exhibit for the Washington Post and wrote that "Manuello Paganelli’s Cuban photographs are a brilliant window on a land and people too long hidden from North American eyes. Working in the tradition of Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, Paganelli brings an artist’s eyes and a native son’s sensibility to his superb photographs." In an interview by the Richmond Times Dispatch at the opening of his Cuba photo exhibit, Paganelli talks about meeting and photographing Gregorio Fuentes, whom Ernest Hemingway used as a model for The Old Manitoba and the Sea. In the same interview Paganelli talks about finding his long-lost family which was separated in 1959 after the Cuban revolution.
Black cowboys documentary
In the early 1990s he started work on his Black Cowboys series, sponsored by Emerge magazine.
In March 2009 this work was featured at The Annenberg Space for Photography. Fine arts nudes
In the mid-1990s he commenced to shoot female nude figures.
As with his black and white documentaries, this work was done with black and white film which he processed and printed himself in his darkroom.
