Catia Montagna
A photographer searching for the poetry of life.
I was born in Italy and have spent most of my adult life in the UK where I work as an academic economist. Photography is for me an important ‘experience’ that helps me see the world and, I think, understand it a bit better. I have been taking photographs since my teenage years and, apart from a darkroom course I took 20 years ago at Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre, I am totally self-taught.
My background in the social sciences has likely influenced my photography. I am interested in how we interact with our environment and how it shapes and is shaped by our activities and cultures and this partly explains why a lot of what I do can be defined as street photography. However, by and large, I do not follow a documentary approach; for me selecting a portion of the world through the viewfinder goes well beyond trying to capture a fragment of reality. I am moved by the subtle poetry of nuances of life – gestures, expressions and atmospheres – that reflect, through the filters of the specificities of time and place, existential tensions and what is universal about the human condition.
