Franco Vaccari was born in Modena in 1936. He was educated in the sciences, and took a degree in Physics.
His art debut was as a visual poet. His subsequent evolution can be gauged by looking at the title of one of his books, from 1966 - Le tracce (Tracks) - and the use he makes in that book of photography, to present graffiti as anonymous found poetry. The theme of the track and the photographic medium are two constants found throughout his work. From the outset, Vaccari does not use photography to produce mimetic, analogical images, but as the imprint of a presence, a signal, a physical trace or track of a being-there: a track that gets its meaning from the existential, often opaque relationship that joins it to what caused it. In this sense, his project for the Venice Biennial of 1972 is emblematic, with the "Exhibition in Real Time no. 4 - Leave a Photographic Trace of Your Passing".
The position of his artwork is tangential to several areas, but what perhaps best expresses its meaning is the term "conceptual realism".
He is recognized as the inventor of the concept of  "real time exhibition", which he has explored in both theoretical and operative ways. Vaccari has also accompanied his artistic activity with theoretical reflections, and has published, among other works: Duchamp e l'occultamento del lavoro - 1978, Fotografia e inconscio tecnologico - 1979, the latter considered "the most important Italian contribution to the present debate on photography" (A. Colombo, "Panorama", 24 October 1983), and Duchamp messo a nudo - dai ready-made alla finanza creativa - 2010.
To date he has produced 38 "exhibitions in real time", about fifteen videos presented in 2003 at the Locarno Film Festival, and 25 "artist's books".
Besides the event in 1972, he has shown at the Venice Biennial in 1980 and 1993, always in solo spaces. In 2010 he was invited to participate at the Gwangju Biennial in Korea, considered the most important Biennial in the Far East.
He is presently a professor of Visual Arts at the Milan Polytechnic.