Who and why I am as an artistic nude photographer
Seek ouy yuor inner light; ph: Francesco Coppola
A common question answered
There is a question I am asked, in various forms, with various degrees of politeness: why the nude?
The honest answer is not one thing. It is several things at once, not all of them comfortable to admit. I have my fair number of psychological scars inside of me, the kind that does not resolve cleanly into therapy or conversation, but finds a shape in image-making. Medical conditions, educations, personal cultural drives, the very simple fact that I am a generation X individual that has lived in promising years only to be deeply deluded on how my own nation declined. My own associative intelligence that is too aware of what is going around since forever and the fact that I don’t forget anything, are all component of a machinery that forged my artistic drive.
There is also philosophy in it: a genuine conviction that the unclothed human body, and specifically the feminine body, is a perfect instrument of looking at attraction and relationships and their difficulties that I have not found another medium for. The camera, in this context, is not a tool of exposure. It is a tool of attention.
There is also a practical dimension: the artistic nude is a field where human authorship, presence, and intention cannot be replicated by a generative system. That is not nothing.
Wolf, ball of light and child of Chrone; ph: Francesco Coppla
The few things that I know.
What I know, less instinct than considered position, is that narrative is not optional. It is the condition under which the rest becomes art rather than decoration, or worse.
We are living through a moment in which frictionless imagery is being generated at industrial scale. Artificial Intelligence appears to be feverishly adopted by too many brands, as a way to save money laying off entire crew of people, offering images never shot, of badly copied models faces without their permission and, above all, not paying them. In response to this authorized barbarity authenticity is no longer a soft value. It is a competitive distinction.
This is why I believe the less an image is mediated by a screen in post-production, the stronger it tends to be. Not as a rule, those in art are more guidelines than a working principle. The image should carry the weight of the moment it came from. Every layer of digital processing between the shutter and the final print risks diluting that. I am not a purist. I work in both digital and film. But I am increasingly interested in how close to print-ready an image can arrive straight from the camera, from the light, from the decision made in the room.
Which brings me to printing: a concept I consider non-negotiable. A photographer who does not print is, in some meaningful sense, not yet accomplished. The print is the object. Everything before it is preparation. I can print digital images, I can print from film, both are valid routes to a physical image. But there is a further stage, one I am moving toward: the darkroom. Cyanotype. Contact printing. The forms of printmaking where the photographer's hand is literally inside the process. That is where craft becomes undeniable.
It comes to my mind now how much, in my personal experience, on photographic circles, forums, and in every meeting too many photography enthusiasts ask the wrong questions: what gear and setting you used. Why you took a given image you took and how you edited and eventually printed, that should be the real interest instead!
Ok, Bye; ph: Francesco Coppola
Where clarity begins to fade
I do not yet know whether the cyanotype work will pull me fully toward large format film, toward the slower, more deliberate, more expensive practice that entails or whether I will remain what I am now: a hybrid, working across formats, combining them where it serves the image. I do not know how figurative my work will stay, or whether the experiments with abstraction I am drawn to will eventually pull the practice somewhere harder to categorize. Mixed media is a possibility I am watching from afar, still undecided. There are things you can do with an image on paper that you can do only after a heavy passage on Photoshop, but how it will perform the heavily digitally processed image compared to one that obtained its results mainly during the shooting phase?
What I resist is deciding prematurely. I am that kind of photographer that discovers things while shooting and sometimes after shooting.
The publications received, in Unattired, in Artistonish, others, are not the arrival. They are confirmation that the original intuition is not wrong. That what I am making is being read, by informed eyes, as something that belongs in a critical conversation about the medium. That matters to me less as validation and more as information: keep going, something is there.
Where exactly that something leads, I am still finding out.
That seems, for now, like the right place to be.
Shine on!