I am curious of life with idealistic tendencies and a fighter. Someone who believes that shadows are the necessary contrast to enhance the lights. Someone who always tries to keep aligned what I live with what I feel.

I was born in Potenza, a small town in a small but fascinating region (Basilicata) in the South of Italy. Those were the good old days of the Beatles, the Hippies and the miniskirt. My father was an elementary school teacher and amateur photographer who mostly portrayed his family and pupils, with a Ferrania Elioflex 2.

I believe that this was unknowingly the seed that years later sprouted in myself and that was strengthened during the rest of my life. Computer science soon took a central place in my life; I went to university in Pisa. It was then that my great friend Lello, gave me his "old" camera, a Voigtlander Vitoret and together with him, I went into the fascinating meanders of the dark room, developing and printing slides with the Cibachrome process.

My first "teacher" was Luisella D'Alessandro, then president of the Italian Foundation of Photography. She introduced me to some of the “masters” of photography whose workshops I had the opportunity to attend: Larry Fink, Franco Fontana, Joan Fontcuberta.

In Spain I had training in PIC.A (Escuela Internacional Alcobendas Photoespaña) and CFC Bilbao. My permanent tutor and friend is Juan Pablo de Miguel who gave me the tools and the mentality to get a disruptive improvement of my artistic skills.

Of course, I remember very well because I absolutely wanted to do it to my mother as a sign of the infinite love I feel for her and gratitude for everything she is doing for me. It is a portrait done on the side of a window. To dim the lights, I used the curtain she had sewn herself. A photo with a three-quarter pose with the face tilted slightly downwards.

I consider equipment many things that go beyond the camera and lenses. I currently use a Sony Alpha 7R with a versatile Sony 16-35, Sony 200mm, 12mm LAOWA, Samyang 8mm, Zhongyi super macro lens. Sometimes I use a Lumix G2 with lenses: Leica D6 Macro-Elmarit, Lumix G Vario 7-14mm. Lumix G Vario 45-200, Lumix G Vario 14-42.

Apart from that, I must also mention the Rollei C5i Carbon tripod, ND 64 and 1000 neutral density filters, Photoshop, PTGUI, Topaz Gigapixel, DeNoise, Sharpen; Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, a light-table, a light-box, Epson Perfection V750 PRO Scanner, BENQ 26”monitor, an hardware personalized desktop PC, pastel colors, a cork board, needles, pins, museum glue, paper clips.

One day, my teenage son with Down syndrome, seeing an image that I was processing on the PC of a small solitary tree surrounded by gigantic trees that seemed to want to defend him, said to me: "this is me when I'm with grandma".

I think it wasn't just one thing that inspired me; I believe that who I am as an artist and what I hope to convey is the result of the sedimentation of many little things that my life has given me. You create what you have experienced physically or spiritually.

I am attracted by the essentiality, by the substance, by the paused rhythm, by thought, by reflection, by enjoying things giving them enough time with sufficient time for the superficiality to disappear, by spontaneous and "easy-going" people”.

Emotional visual art.

The Gold Medal for my series on the world we are building and the dizzying chasm of the rhythm of life we have, as well as the Silver Medal on diversity, represent a great joy for me, above all because it is the first time that I have achieved similar results in an award such as MUSE Photography Awards so internationally prestigious, but also because, seeing the names and the proposals that share this honor with me, I begin to believe that I can compete in the first division of the visual arts.

To answer this question, I have to stretch a little longer because I am proud to be the winner with 3 series. In all three cases, I decided to send the proposal to the MUSE Photography Award because they touched upon very important topics for me and I considered that I had been able to visualize them adequately and even attractively.

•Astral Journey•: I believe that the abandonment of the countryside for increasingly beehive cities, the irreparable damage that we are causing to the climate and the natural environment, will lead to a desertification of ecosystems and a brutalization of the chaos related to social life. Absurdly I thought that Nature will find refuge in human’s houses and humans will live in a chaotic jungle outside them. Nature will observe us with detachment and compassion.

•Jellyfish Carrousel•: the pace of life in our society pushes us to occupy any space of time with things to do running and superficiality. Time for thought does not exist; the time for substance has been stolen by appearance and the pathological need to appear positivity and happiness. My series wants to denounce the need to get off this carousel and rediscover the organic simplicity and slowness of the movements of such elementary animals as jellyfish.

•The Elephant Man•: the acceptance of diversity in our so "advanced" society is not yet a consolidated conquest. David Lynch denounced it in his The Elephant Man and I wanted to use that same metaphor of the circus in the early 1900s when diversity was seen as a freak show to denounce that even today, albeit in more hypocritical and hidden forms, we continue to see diversity equally.

I still don't know what being a two-time Gold and Silver Winner of the MUSE Photography Award will mean in my “career” as an artist. I'm not very good at capitalizing from a marketing point of view the merits I have but what I'm sure and that these victories will make me feel more confident and even more eager in my future proposals.

I also hope that it will crown the wish that some galleries invite me to present my proposals and possibly convince them to be my representatives. Another thing I'd like to happen is that some publisher could offer me the publication of a book. In fact, the book seems to me a beautiful "end" for an artistic-visual work. At the moment I've self-edited one (https://www.photosatriani.com/Fotopoesie) and I'm working on another that I've titled Cosmos and Chaos.

I think it is right to give credits to my “masters”: Larry Fink, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Juan Pablo de Miguel and Pilar Pequeño.

The best advice I received by my mentors was to make me understand that art is not only inspiration and aesthetics, but also hard and persevering "dirty" work made of technique, craft ability, do and redo and a lot of frustration management.

Photography is in another moment of deep rupture. At the moment, we are still in the confrontation and territory marking phase. Anyone who innovates is branded a profiteer and a cheating by those who intend to defend the past and thus preserve their "business". I think in the future the image will not be the most important thing, but the "concept" behind it will be. The concept will be the differentiating aspect.

Consequently, whoever wants to become a photographer today, must necessarily include other disciplines in his knowledge and must necessarily know how to "play" in this new “game board” in which what we consider reality up to now will simply be one of the many possible realities, all equally real.

My words of wisdom certainly do not derive from the artistic mastery that is recognized in me, they derive from age and lived experiences. I would say that before standing up as champions of any truth it is always better to touch what you want to criticize or what you are afraid of. If we follow this simple advice, we will respect more what others are and propose and we will be more open to accept other forms of seeing and creating, thus enriching the community to which we belong.

In any case to be curious of life imply to be open-mind but also having a critical judgment trained in the gym of life and culture.

Dostoevskij said "beauty will save the world". I agree but it's not enough because to beauty, we need to add content, elegance, and an open mind to know how to appreciate it and not fear it. Art is Nature that expresses itself through our humanity. Thanks so much!