Luciano Gaudenzio(Italy)
"The mysterious beauty of a landscape doesn’t depend on its aesthetics or even its power, but on the infinity of stories that could take place and involve us in there”
Stories that must be discovered and shared with passion, trying to connect with the environment, striving to understand how it communicates with you and what it has to tell you, appreciating the sensations and emotions it inspires and finding ways to communicate them to others, never losing sight of a fundamental aspect that must be present in every relationship, the respect.
Hence the author's desire to (re)discover the landscape through the camera, to celebrate its beauty and variety, but above all to raise awareness of the general public to its preservation and protection.
Luciano Gaudenzio was born in Pordenone in 1969, has a degree in Business Administration, and has been working for several years as a professional photographer specialised in nature reportages and promotion of territories. His images regularly appear on covers and reports of the major Italian and foreign magazines, among which Condé Nast Traveller, GEO, National Geographic Traveller, Bell'Europa Bell'Italia…, as well as being of various photographic books. His pictures have been awarded and distinguished in some of the sector's most important photographic competitions, among which the first prize, landscape section, in the most important nature photography contest in the world, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2020. He has made many solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad and took part in many collective exhibitions, like the prestigious Wonders of Nature. The Intelligence of Creation, on the animal and plant life in the world, organised by the Gasometer Museum in Oberhausen (Germany), in cooperation with GEO magazine. In recent years in particular he has dedicated himself to the realization of seven major projects, "Vaia, the future of forests in the Alps", a photographic project dedicated to the forests resulting from the storm Vaia (2018-current), "L'Altro Versante", a project to (re)discover through the photography the Italian natural heritage and mountains, in particular, to celebrate their variety and beauty, and ultimately raise awareness among the general public for their preservation (2014-current), "Le montagne incantate" series of volumes on Italian mountains published by National Geographic and the Italian Alpine Club (2019-20)", "I custodi del Territorio" web-series (2016-current), "Cent'anni dopo: memories of war, glances of peace" a Fuji photographic project dedicated to the re-discovery of the Dolomites transformed by the events of the First World War (2017-2018), “Julian Alps , mountain without borders” a multimedia project into the beauty of a unique territory among enchanting valleys and bold mountains along the border of Italy and Slovenia, from 2019 proclaimed a Biosphere Reserve by Unesco, and “Geapulse, visions of climate change” (2018-present), an innovative multimedia project through which we want to focus attention on environmental issues caused by climate changes. Since 2015 he is also director of photography for the production of documentaries and short films linked to the promotion of the territory and to the social communication for important private businesses and local institutions for tourism.
Furthermore, he is founder and photographer for the photo agency PHOTOFVG, specialised in photographs and reportages about landscapes and tourism.
Since always, the most important choices of my life have been guided by a sense of curiosity and wonder for nature. Over the years, this passion grew and made me born the idea (and the desire) to share with others, to make these emotions timeless. It was therefore natural that I quickly approached the language of images that then over time has become a profession. Doing this job, photographing Nature, fascinates and surprises me. A small variation of light, the time that changes, a slightly different angle of shooting, make the subject you are photographing completely different. And then, the place that, each time, tells us a different story. In my photography, especially in landscape, composition and details have always been fundamental. When I was shooting with film, I was fascinated by the possibility of having a camera that could guarantee me, in a larger portion of film, greater quality and ability to reproduce details. Hence, my choice of medium format, which then failed with the transition from film to digital. When the GFX system appeared on the market, a digital medium format, I had no doubts that it was the most suitable system for my photography. An infinitely more " light" system than the one I had used with film, less heavy and bulky, but able to capture many more details and give me back that three-dimensionality that, by abandoning film, I seemed to be missing. And then, the intimate need to return to a more meditated photography, a "slow" photography capable of looking beyond and interpreting what the landscape wants to reveal and tell me each time, from the most intimate detail to the most endless spaces.
