Stefano CERIO

Italian photographer Stefano CERIO (1962-) lives and works between Rome and Paris. At 18 years old he started photographing for the Italian weekly L’Espresso. During this first part of his career Stefano CERIO made portraits for both fashion magazines and newspapers.

The year 2001 is a turning point, in this new millennium Stefano CERIO began an explorative photography approach. Landscapes and architectures in the skillfully treated colors become a theater of absence. It stress an inaccessibility of the subjects: places of holidays or leisure in which we only pass. Stefano CERIO explores the collective unconscious representations we share about those areas. He deals with our expectations and the reality. Thus, in a same picture the fantasized image met the memorized one.

The uncanny emerges as a result of themes and of the peculiar shooting technique he used. The large format allows an array of tones. Stefano CERIO exploits it in his photographs to puzzle the viewer. He uses the possibilities of the view camera to give a feeling of unreality by the shades richness. Such setup needs the photographer to foresight the photos and to prepare it.

Stefano CERIO, Huairou, series: Chinese Fun, 2015.

Stefano CERIO, landscape photographer of the uncanniness

The derealization occurs in multiple ways. By photographing by night with the help of a spotlight for instance, we find this system for the series Night Ski (2012) and Night Games (2017). The light plays the role of indicative, it points out and delineates a chimerical object. Winter Aquapark (2012) and Chinese Fun (2015), for their part, underline the contrast between space and heights. The desolate aspect of the photographed areas allows to conceive the sometime present crowd. Disconnected to their functions, those places win in strangeness. Cruise Ship (2014) seems to be in-between both approach. Stefano CERIO adds to some photos of this series an effect of profusion witch enhance the vacuity.

Theses series are bound together by the absence of gaudy viewpoints. It is by kneading the ordinary the photographer achieves to reveal the uncanniness coiled inside the subjects. If you want to grasp the subtle enigma laying there, we invite you to take a closer look at Stefano CERIO's photo series.