Photographer

Guido Stilon was born in Valletta and lived in St Paul’s Street and St Christopher Street. While still a student Guido’s passion for photography began in the mid 1950s.

Guido Stilon never considered photography as a career. He did sell colour slides of his work at the Ellis photo studio in Valletta and to passers-by in front of Castille. He worked using one of two Exakta cameras that he owned, always carrying additional lenses and rolls of black and white and diapositive slide film wherever he went.

Despite never identifying as a professional photographer, Stilon had his photos included in numerous publications abroad and featured anonymously in local television programmes, was commissioned to document the excavation of the Tas-Silġ archaeological site, and was awarded several international photography prizes, including Kodak’s The World and its People competition, through which a number of his photographs were displayed at the New York World’s Fair in 1964.

Guido Stilon died at the young age of 43. He is remembered by his friends and family as a quiet and unassuming man, rarely seen without a camera. His widow, Grace, kept his vast collection of photographic negatives and colour slides for over forty years, and in 2018 contacted ‘Magna Żmien’ in order to preserve his images for future generations.

In 2020 ‘Magna Żmien’ produced the first exhibition of Guido Stilon’s work, Malta in Transition at the Malta Postal Museum, Valletta. ‘Magna Żmien have digitised 2,000 images from his collection of over 9,000 black and white 35mm negatives, and in collaboration with his friends and family, a small number of these images were selected to portray the theme of ‘Malta in Transition’, capturing a period during the 1950s and 1960s when Guido Stilon was most active taking photographs in Malta.

This biography is part of the collection created by Michael Schiavone over a 30-year period. Read more about Schiavone and his initiative here.