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Nicola Ducati
Nicola Ducati
Nicola Ducati

Nicola Ducati

Country: Italy
Birth: 1973

My name is Nicola Ducati
I am an Italian photographer, travel and portrait photography is my expressive medium. With my pictures I want to tell stories that create empathy between the viewer and the subject with elegance and authenticity.

I was born in a small town among the Italian Alps.

I have always lived in a beautiful place that has made me grow and appreciate nature, animals, quiet places and respect for what surrounds us, I think this way of living in the countryside has greatly influenced my photographic sensitivity.

I approached the world of photography by chance. As a child, I used to play with an old camera found who knows where, a shabby but fascinating object that soon became a passion. Later, my curiosity led me to experiment with many different genres, from the first landscape, travel photography, and finally the travel portrait.
Today I especially like photography, which tells stories but also lets you imagine them, which excites and suggests reflections. A narrating photography.


What I like
I photograph only what I like and what fascinates me, I am a curious person and i try to find what in the world unites us not what divides us, I mean that I try to bring out those traits of humanity that make us all connected. An exercise to accept with empathy the entropy of our world.

My photography is not conceptual, it represents what I see, what I feel important, what excites me or moves me. I love when the emotion and the story hidden inside a picture reaches the observer. I entrust my work and aesthetics photography to the task of telling and giving the observer inspiration and sense of belonging. Photography that responds to this, is a successful one.
 

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Micaela Mau
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Micaela Mau is a German-Italian artist. She has studied visual communication at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome and at the School of Visual Arts in New York as well as Foreign Languages and Literature at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre. While studying and working abroad in Tokyo, Frankfurt, and London she developed an interest in photography, fascinated by the ambiguous relationship between photographic image and reality. She currently lives and works in Florence, Italy. Statement "To me photography is not only a tool to capture fleeting impressions in time and share what caught my attention, but also, and above all, a means of interpreting and reinterpreting reality. My photographic work comprises abstract images that put the bond between photographic reproduction and its referent to the test, often making the original subject almost indistinguishable. Alongside these works I develop more realistic projects concerning our perception of the world and how it is conveyed through photography. Lately I have started to work with analog media, reflecting on the materiality of photographs and negatives, rather than considering them mere image supports. My work is founded on the belief that there is no such thing as an objective photograph. Photography cannot depict reality accurately since the human element – intrinsically fallible and predisposed to subjective perception – pervades all stages of photographic development. Furthermore, the laws of physics, optics and chemistry, pose technical limitations, constraining the medium’s ability to accurately record reality. Last but not least, there’s chance, an unpredictable force capable of influencing the best planned outcomes. Photography, therefore, cannot but be a medium of subjective expression. For this reason I try to embrace the limitations at hand and to make them an integral part of my work." -- Micaela Mau
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Edward Steichen (1879 - 1973) was born in Luxembourg, but immigrated to the United States, to Milwaukee, in 1880. In 1894, Steichen began a four-year lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. After hours, he would sketch and draw, and began to teach himself to paint. Having come across a camera shop near to his work, he bought his first camera, a secondhand Kodak box "detective" camera, in 1895. In 1900, as Steichen headed to Paris to study painting, he stopped in New York. By that time he was an aspiring painter and an accomplished photographer in the soft-focus, Pictorial style and he made a pilgrimage to the Camera Club of New York to show his work to Alfred Stieglitz, the leading tastemaker in American photography. Stieglitz, vice-president of the Camera Club and editor of its journal Camera Notes, was impressed by the young artist from Milwaukee and bought three of his photographs-a self-portrait and two moody, atmospheric woodland scenes printed in platinum-for the impressive sum of five dollars each. Elated, Steichen then boarded the ship for Europe. Once in France, Steichen quickly abandoned his painting studies and began to focus his energies on photography. He learned the technical intricacies of the gum bichromate process, popular among the members of the Photo-Club de Paris, and developed a reputation as a portraitist of noted artists, writers, and members of society. Arriving back in New York in 1902, Steichen rented a studio on the top floor of a brownstone at 291 Fifth Avenue and hung out his shingle; his work as a professional portrait photographer flourished. That same year, Stieglitz announced the formation of the Photo-Secession-the name he gave to the loose-knit group of photographers he exhibited, published, and promoted during the next decade and a half-and the publication of a new, still more lavish journal, Camera Work. Over the fifteen-year, fifty-issue run of Camera Work, no other artist would be featured as prominently as Steichen, who had sixty-five photographs and three paintings reproduced in fifteen issues, including a "Special Steichen Supplement" in April 1906 and an all-Steichen double issue in 1913. In 1906, Steichen determined "to get away from the lucrative but stultifying professional portrait business" and return to France with his family in hopes of resuscitating his idled painting career. It was a move with numerous consequences. For one, it positioned him to embrace the Autochrome, the process for making glass-plate color transparencies introduced by the Lumière brothers in 1907. Steichen-who had experimented with various methods such as gum bichromate to introduce color into his photographs-was enthralled by the technique. Steichen also made what he called his "first attempt at serious documentary reportage" in the summer of 1907, using a borrowed hand camera. Steichen returned to the U.S. in 1914. Serving in the US Army in World War I (and the US Navy in the Second World War), Steichen commanded significant units contributing to military photography. After World War I, during which he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces, he reverted to straight photography, gradually moving into editorial and fashion photography. His portraits of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, and other celebrities appeared in Vogue and Vanity Fair in the 1920s and 1930s. From 1947-1962, Steichen served as the Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art.. Among other accomplishments, Steichen is appreciated for creating the 1955 exhibition, The Family of Man, at the Museum of Modern Art consisting of over 500 photographs. Steichen purchased a farm that he called Umpawaug in 1928, just outside West Redding, Connecticut, and lived there until his death. Source: Howard Greenberg Gallery
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As Frazier explains, "the collaboration between my family and myself blurs the line between self-portraiture and social documentary". Often her work focuses on the plight of her home town of Braddock, Pennsylvania which became financially depressed after the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970–80s. With black and white photographs, Frazier highlights the beauty of Braddock and how this town has impacted her family's life along with other residents. Her still photographs have a raw sense of strength and vulnerability juxtaposed in an honest and personal way. Besides working on her most famous work Notion of Family, Frazier has worked with other contemporary issues such as the Flint water crisis. This particular project depicts and focuses on a young woman and her family living their everyday lives amongst the crucial water conditions within their lower-class Flint community. 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