Entry Title: " ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis"
Name: Alessandro Grassani, Italy
Category: Professional, Family


Entry Description: ALS is a rare pathology; the causes are unknown and there is no cure. This disease completely paralyzes the body, sparing only the eyes used to communicate and the brain which maintains its functions 100%. The majority of ALS cases in Italy become dramatic not only for the patients afflicted but also for the family who has to guarantee 24-hour a day medical assistance: in Italy the State does little or nothing to help them.
Thanks to their tenacity, ALS sufferers have become the emblem and icon of many other sufferers of rare diseases that in Italy are considered to be too few to be heard and too expensive to help.

Alessandro Grassani born in Pavia 1977, graduates in photography at the Riccardo Bauer Institute of Milano, where he lives. He begins working as photographer in the advertising industry but throughout the years his job brought him around the world looking for stories about social themes and covering international events. He has been represented by Grazia Neri Agency and his works has been published by Time Magazine, Sunday Times, Diaries Japan, Vanity Fair, Mare, Der Spiegel, Internazionale, Sette del Corriere della Sera and L’ Equipe magazine, among the others. Grassani's corporate clients have included Enel SPA, Lufthansa, Ferrovie dello Stato (the Italian State railway company), CommerzBank and ICE ( Italian foreign trade institution). His works has included features from the Balkans, South America and Asia. In 2004, with the funeral of Yasser Arafat he has starded to cover the ongoing conflicts in Israel and Palestine. He works also in Iran, where he goes for the first time at the end of 2003, in order to document the effects of the Bam's earthquake and he returns many times after the victory to the elections of the conservative president Ahmadinejad: he works on a long term project about the complex Iranian society and in 2010 he begins also a new long term project about climate refugees. His images are part of the Fnac Collection as well as part of the Holocaust Museum of Jerusalem Collection. He has exhibited his work in personal and collective exhibitions among which: International Festival of Photojournalism in Rome, Savignano sul Rubicone FestivalFoto and at the International Photographic Festival of Arles. He was awarded with a honourable mention in the FNAC contest (2007) and in the Memorial Mario Giacomelli (2010).