CATIA MONTAGNA
ARTIST'S STATEMENT //
I was born in Italy and have spent most of my adult life in the United Kingdom. I am an academic economist by profession and a self-taught photographer.
My background in the social sciences has likely influenced my photography. A lot of what I do is street photography, and I am interested in how we interact with our environment and how it shapes and is shaped by our activities. 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 small, insignificant moments of the life around us and the tension they reflect between what is universal in the human condition and the specificities of time and place. I think that the ‘existential’ that transpires from what we see in the streets the world over is best captured by B&W photography, which I favour.