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Marco Scataglini
I’m a photographer, in the meaning that photography is my life. I was born in Rome (Italy) in 1964, the same day (20th of February) – but different year! – of Ansel Adams. We are both “fishes in th...view moreI’m a photographer, in the meaning that photography is my life. I was born in Rome (Italy) in 1964, the same day (20th of February) – but different year! – of Ansel Adams. We are both “fishes in the aquarium” (this is a quote from Adams Autobiography). After 15 years in the editorial system, photographing for some of the most important Italian travel magazines (I shot about 200 geographic reportages, most of all about Italy), I returned to my old passion: Fine Art photography. I works on photographic projects that inspired me, and use traditional techniques and digital. I live in Tuscania, a small town in central Italy, between the borders of Lazio, Tuscany and Umbria, where I can found the subjects I need.
I dedicated myself especially (but not exclusively) to Pinhole photography, toy cameras, and the so-called Lo-Fi photography (literally "low-fidelity") that is not, as some might think, a photograph of low quality, just blurry, badly framed and empty of meaningful content. On the contrary: in the Lo-Fi side of photography, the whole focus is in the quality of the content, rather than on the technical means; also, the use of “poor” cameras and other low cost photographic materials, requires to the photographer a considerable expertise, because there aren't automatisms or technical support to help him.
On the other hand, the Lo-Fi photography is born as a reaction to an excess of technicality, which simplifies everything.
With the use of toy cameras, economic vintage cameras (such as Box Cameras of the '30s), strange lenses (self-built lenses made with a "simple lens", or the use of surveillance camera, the so-called CCTV lenses, and so on), a pinhole camera (which instead of a lens uses a microscopic pinhole) or digital techniques such as Infrared, multiple exposures, creative post-production, I try to create a corpus of images that invokes on one side the pictorialist photos of the heroic age of photography (between XIX and XX century), and on the other side, thanks to the low intrinsic quality (good definition only in the center, with blurry edges, vignetting, soft focus, etc.), sharp the attention on the subject rather than on the lines per millimeter, or the extraordinary sharpness or the perfection of sparkling colors.
In this sense, the choice to shoot primarily in black and white (analog and digital), generally toned in warm colors or duotone, or pastel colors, it is functional to the way I see the world, and therefore I photograph it.
I love timeless, romantic, evanescent, atmospheric, emotional, evocative and intimate photographs; I shrink from landscapes and situations too "spectacular", that often leading to the creation of photographs (so prevalent on the Internet today) whose strength lies all in the representation (more or less standardized) of breathtaking location. Make a beautiful picture having an available landscape, a normal place or monument and using a camera (in this case the analog and digital) anything but "high-end", is a challenge that I like very much to collect!
In addition to the normal printing techniques now standardized (c-prints and inkjet), also I use the Cyanotype printing, an ancient technique that, thanks to the possibility of manipulation, fits my needs perfectly.
With regard to content, I consider myself a photographer who specializes in that area I would call, "Nature & Heritage": landscapes, flowers and plants, streams and waterfalls, in connection with historical elements such as Etruscan tombs, ruins of castles and mills, drywall and various testimonies of human activity. Obviously, not every photo that I realize contains these elements, but the set of pictures related to a project (since I work almost exclusively on projects) born from the union of nature and human evidences of the past. In this, I refer to the great travelers of the past, those who followed the Grand Tour in Italy, and that found in this mixture of natural landscapes and architectural and archaeological sites, the symbol itself of the beauty of our country. I like to imagine myself as a traveler of that times: this also explains my passion for all that, especially in the field of photography, is "vintage" or has a taste of the past. All without any unnecessary melancholy, of course ...view less