Marcella

Marcella Marone Pittaluga, born in New York in 1964, lives in Torino till she leaves in 1988 for Barcelona, then France, Switzerland, USA and finally Chile where she will spend 11 years working and living together with her family. Nowadays she lives between Tuscany and Chile.

Her passion for photography begins in the late 80’s, and as her father gifts her with his old Nikon and her first enlarger Meopta, the first darkroom in an empty bathroom is born.

She meets in Nice (France) in 92’ with photographer Martinetti, where she starts developing her black and white pictures and working on color, shooting slides in the streets of the city in the south of France.

In New York in 95’ she attends ICP (international Center for Photography) where she deepens her knowledge on black and white, street photography and darkroom techniques in a very live environment, were teamwork, interpersonal relations and cultural engagement between photographers from different countries and background, motivates her to further explore her inclination on portrait and reportage. Her working tools will consist then, and for a few years, of a secondhand Leica R5 with a 100 mm lens and a Beseler enlarger, while the center of her photographic focus will forever be the human being in all its nuances and facets.

In Chile (1996/2005), at the Universidad Catòlica De Chile she studies with photographer Patty Novoa with which the work will aim at specific targeted projects and its performance in the darkroom. There, through the use of different darkroom techniques, both with BW and color applied in developing baths, she will attain a knowledge that would then become very useful in the years to come, switching from analogue to digital photography. The broad experience, professionality and great humanity of Patricia Novoa brings her to further explore into the deep relationship between photographic technique and portrait.

During the eleven years spent in Chile she will dedicate herself in Santiago to commissioned portraits, her personal project Manos a La Vega and the collaboration in this field with interior designer Jaqueline Domeyko, whilst in the southern part of the country, she will discover and live with some of the characters that will inhabit her shots.

Returning to Italy sees her dealing with the ‘switch’ from analogue to digital.

‘Translating’ the analogue process that starts with the shooting and finishes with self-developing and printing, into the digital workflow, is both new and complex. To this day her strong commitment to Fine Art Printing continues, also in collaboration with Printer and Photographer Antonio Manta.

Today she dedicates herself to personal projects, portraits and reportage. Travelling for work strictly solo, she searches with a mix of respect, calmness, curiosity and the necessary time, the right contact with humanity and their world, in a space where she seeks to be accepted in order to be able to access the recesses of their identity.

Form the darkness of the camera to the light, PEOPLE will come alive with great strength only if a true connection is established.

“Towards the light, through my shadows”  

I have always felt constricted living by strict rules: life itself, master of the game, has duly presented me the process of it. Photography is the place where I can breathe – where instinctively I follow workflows that tend not to be predetermined, where rules change simply depending on the moods or lights, where I leave enough space for the creative process to run undisturbed, and where visual language itself sustains me through the encounters in which I design my characters.  

Drama is a reality that I know well and has permeated fragments of my existence, pressing against my legs, like barbwire. As a result, my characters and my research tend to converge in the opposite direction, almost as if to redeem drama itself in a vision aiming towards the search of a way out. Light then penetrates warmth through what I call the “anthropology of encounters”, and it is emanated directly from the characters themselves, passing through the lens, transforming into wings for me to fly upon.  

The photographic experience allows me to look at humanity walking the complex roads of its existence: from within the deep well of my subjects’ lives, I tend to perceive the hope, the strength, and their insatiable capacity and tension towards a way out of obscurity, strife, and oblivion. Working alone and travelling independently gives me the option to handle time and spaces necessary to understand and listen to this process.  

The photographic project becomes, at this point, an unbound journey in which I can move from inside myself toward the outside, creating ‘biunivocal correspondences’ between human beings that become… images.

Exhibitions

Una selezione di sessantacinque scatti realizzati tra il 2015 e il 2017, svela attraverso i temi ricorrenti, i parallelismi, le tensioni del lavoro di Marcella Marone Pittaluga iniziato… | Read More

Mani, corpi, volti: a Milano arrivano gli scatti “parlanti” di Marcella Marone Pittaluga | Read More

“necessità di sopravvivenza”, i suoi scatti sono un progetto in continua evoluzione, e sono ricomposte, in questa mostra, in una geografia che mette in luce tematiche come | Read More

I soggetti dei ritratti sono gente di strada, persone incontrate per caso, con le quali Pittaluga instaura un rapporto, in cui la parola diventa strumento essenziale | Read More