FEDERICO QUINTANA
be inspired
Born in Italy but grew up with Argentine passport due to my father’s line of work, nowadays I hold both nationalities dearly. I discovered photography in my teens as a way to freeze memories of the things that impressed me most but it quickly became a direct means of communication. The decision to become professional soon followed. I ended up studying journalism and photojournalism at ASU in the US. A couple of years after graduation I had moved to Argentina and worked as staff photographer for Lugares magazine, from newspaper la Nacion, with whom I still collaborate to this day. After moving to Italy in 1999, I started a collaboration with French photo agency SIPA/IMAGE in Paris which lasted several years. During that time I focused mainly in South America but also did work in Central and North America. My work has been featured in BBC Wildlife magazine, Animan Switzerland, Terra in Brazil, La Nacion, LFI recently and others. I focused on editorial, wildlife, documentary, and human interest work mostly and specialised in South America. During that time I also worked on personal projects in the Bolivian Andes documenting salt and tin miners and remote native tribes. I also covered a lot of miles in Patagonia, Northern Argentina and China during the years to follow. Then came a difficult time between the digital and analogue world and a crisis that affected many professionals as well as the agencies, including myself. I kind of lost my way in photography altogether at that time. The digital transition was extremely difficult for me and I stepped away for a while. I started again professionally with digital equipment in 2013. At first covering high speed motorcycle racing and eventually covering 24h Le Mans and a few Superbike World Championship races, until 2015. During the last five years, I’ve been trying to get back to my true photographic nature and approaching again documentary work, as well as preparing new projects. Lately I have been trying to consolidate my prior documentary work done mostly in analogue during the 90's with the more recent work in digital.