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How did I become a photographer? Daddy was a photojournalist, a cinematographer and a great dad. I grew up among the chemical smells of the darkroom and the magic of photos that appear in the water. How can you resist something so fascinating? After a bad school career in a technical institute, I’ve been looking for something more creative and I found my freedom studying film and theatre. During the entire college period I learned how to take photographs. Theatre was my training ground. I was shooting on film and I learned to develop my negatives and to print my pictures in the darkroom. While studying film and theatre I met my soul mate and we started our adventure together. It was 1999. Similarly together we started our photo apprenticeship working with advertising agencies and making corporate reportages. We photographed of everything and we loved those works, to see them on the walls of our city was priceless. My degree with laude was a rematch and I decided that photography was exactly what I wanted to do when I grew up. I started to attend workshops and the meetings with Leonard Freed and later with Ferdinando Scianna pushed me to decide. In 2003 I started my adventure in the wedding business and I called Claudio to my side. Immediately we tried to propose a more lively and free from constraints service; this approach brought us good luck. I still remember the strong emotion when in 2013 a photo taken by me won a contest by Wedding Photojournalist Association and thanks to the other excellent results that year I was in the top 20 among the members of that prestigious society.
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I was born in Bari, a city in front of the sea to which I’ve always had a strong passion that pushed me to attend the sailing course of Centro Velico Caprera and to obtain the nautical driving license. My father, an atypical engineer, has always had a strong passion for arts; when he was young used to paint and to take photographs. His cameras fascinated me so much, particularly the Zeiss Contarex Ciclope ’58 that I asked him to bring with me on a trip to Iceland in 1995. Leaving alone was a wonderful adventure, with my backpack filled with the Contarex and several Fuji Velvia rolls. Since then my passion for photography has done nothing but grow: I set up a darkroom in the toilet and after a short time I was lucky to have one of my own in a mansard where I could take my time to develop and print black and white photos. I always liked reportage, I remember that in 1998 I went alone to Rome to see a Henry Cartier-Bresson personal exhibition at Palazzo delle Esposizioni of which I still keep the catalogue; while in 2005 I attended a workshop of those that change you: Street Life in Rome taught by David Alan Harvey, Magnum Agency and NatGeo photographer. Another thing that changed my life was meeting Raffaella in 1999: we fell in love and photography was the first thing we shared. Raffaella and I together wanted to infuse our passion for reportage in wedding and events photography and soon after her I managed to enter the top 25 ranking of Wedding Photojournalist Association (WPJA) members. Apart from photography, I like music, which is in my life maybe longer than photography: I’ve been playing electric bass and embarrassingly the doublebass from 1991 and I happened to play live with several friends who are great musicians.