Apparel | Thursday, January 15, 2009

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ON AND OFF THE RUNWAY: Photo essay by Giulia Piccari

By Greg Wang

Here, Italian photojournalist Giulia Piccari’s behind-the-scenes look at Supima’s second annual Competition for Emerging Designers, which had its grand finale in Gotham Hall last night.

Curious about the 30-year-old Rimini native’s own creative process, we also asked her how and why she became attracted to documenting fashion.

What do you like about fashion?

By being a reporter I love the way I have found to express my photography even in the fashion field. My pictures are a documentary of all the work behind a runway show. I use my senses, all I have learned at school, and my own way to see “the right picture” through a lense before the “click.”

How did you become interested in photography?

Photography came into my life when I was only 22 and I wasnt sure which way take in my life. I got close to photography when in 2000 I was living in London—-where I had gone to learn English—and I started studying photography in college.

When I realized that the darkroom was a perfect way to express myself I decided to come back to Italy to study it for three years in Rome at the Istituto Superiore di Fotografia—one of the best Rome can offer. I had an amazing reportage teacher named Dario Coletti who taught me when a picture works, how to balance the image, where the eye goes when it look at a picture . . .

What happened when you left school?

Actually, while I was still studying in Rome I started assisting photographers and working for few charity associations such as Emergency and Telethon.

Traveling on a boat I have worked as a still photographer for two years for the TV documentary “L’Italia dei porti” based on how the Italian coast has been improved in the last years. The documentary was showed on Rai channel and for the same TV Company I shot for the concert dedicated to the 9/11 victims.

Still on boat I have shot for three days to document the first swimming crossing of 11 swimmers from Croatia to Italy on June 2003 and then published a book about that event.

In the same year I have won a photography competition where the chairman was the Italian movie director Giuseppe Tornatore.

What kind of equipment do you use?

I started shooting with a manual Nikon and I used to develop my films and print my pictures in the darkroom of the school: I used to spend 15 hours there without even realizing how fast the time was passing by. When digital came into the photography business I bought a Nikon D100, one of the first to come out on the market at that time.