A Striking Conversation with Claudia Sinigaglia

Photo courtesy of artist

Claudia Sinigaglia is a photographer based in Milan, Italy. Her work has been featured in various publications internationally. Along with being awarded numerous prizes for her work, her photos have been featured throughout Europe and Asia in both solo and group exhibits. It was great to ask Claudia how she taps into her creative process, captures behavior, and how she would describe her artistic style.

UZOMAH: How do you use art as a narrative to navigate and to address themes and issues?

CLAUDIA: I’m interested in the possibility of training the eye in finding alternative perspectives. Narratives, together with drawings and photographs, become part of a real investigation process oriented towards asking questions, generating awareness, and developing different points of view. Many of my projects develop from dialogues or from readings, so it happens that texts become an integral part of the work. For example, one of my recent projects commissioned by @ilcrepaccio developed through some conversations with the biologist Yasuhiko Irie and the work took shape in this interaction space between images and texts.

U: How do you tap into your creative process before starting a project?

C: I do mostly research, I write down projects and ideas constantly, then through exhibitions or collaborations, the projects take their shape. It can happen that works come to life from random dialogues or from images that I find around me. The exchange of ideas with specialists from different fields remains central to me in order to deepen some issues that then emerge in my works. 

Untitled (collective behavior), Milan lambda print

U: Your photos capture behavior and even display traits. What aspect technically in photography helps you create such captivating photos of people in everyday situations, and where they inhabit?

C: I don’t focus much on photography techniques. I proceed by trial and error, doing experiments until I get the result I have in mind. In many of my works, the photos try to reach a limit in which the image becomes ambiguous, I look for the point where the image can be perceived as different from itself. The photographs of the series “Untitled (Constellations)”, for example, look like starry skies but they are pictures of artificial lights in large cities where usually the starry sky is not seen. The photographs of the “Untitled (collective behavior)” series look like images constructed with people lined up in choreography, but they are photos taken in random moments. Answering the second part of your question, all these photos are taken in different metropolises, in Milan where I live, but also in Shanghai, Tokyo, St. Petersburg and other cities where I have traveled over the years. Metropolises, and urban spaces in general, have always fascinated me a lot as a meeting point and hub of social interactions.

U: Do you shoot both digital and film?

C: I shoot mainly digital if the project doesn’t require film for specific reasons.

Untitled (collective behavior), Milan gelatin silver print

U: When selecting photos what makes the good picture stand out from the average?

C: There are no hard and fast rules. I work often with series, so in a certain way, the images go organically together integrating with the idea behind the work. It happens to discard images that are technically more correct than others, I think that some of my pics can also be read as a sort of visual note accompanying the drawings and my research.

Untitled (stadium) pencil drawing on paper

U: How would you describe your photography style?

C: I would describe it as my way of lingering on what surrounds me, a way of creating visual feedback to thoughts. 

U: Do you prefer black and white or color to shoot your photos?

C: I don’t have a favorite one. I use what is needed for the structure of the work.

U: What are some things you wish to use art to showcase Italy and where you live?

C: Local spaces interest me when considering their relationship with global spaces. I would shift the attention to our decision-making processes and on how we develop our relations. Today we increasingly recognize that nothing happens in isolation. Most events and phenomena are connected, caused by, and interacting with a huge number of other pieces of a complex universal puzzle.

Untitled (constellations), Dubai – JBR inkjet print on cotton paper

U: What about photography do you like the most?

C: I like to use photography for its immediacy. The current technology allows us to take visual notes of contemporary reality with extreme ease. I’m interested in photography as a tool for investigating the world, for its isomorphism with reality. That is also why photography finds many applications in scientific fields. More generally, I'm also fascinated by the thousands of images that we are able to produce, and by the fact that, ideally, we could obtain an infinity of other images from each image.

For more information and updates about Claudia’s work please visit her site.