Michele Di Donato

Live in Paris

by Michele Di Donato
This book has been successfully funded and will be sent to print soon. if you are a backer you'll get email notifications for each step until it's shipped.

Project Description

My trip to Paris begins from Montmartre, as I was captivated by the 360-degree view of the city. In front of that spectacle, I feel small and almost overwhelmed by so much beauty, but there I realized that I did not want to tell about the iconic and well-known Paris; instead, I wanted” to tell about the life of Parisians, the everyday life, made up of small refined boutiques, little stores filled with vintage objects and clothes, typical brasseries, boulangeries with the smell of freshly baked baguettes.

It was a long journey in which I represented diversity, extravagance, peculiarities; walking around the city, scrutinized places, men, women, losing myself in the reflections of those particular encounters. Each one seemed to carry with him his story, his dreams, sufferings and happiness, all his experience; people appeared to me alive in the deepest sense of the word, real.

Live in Paris Book – Michele Di Donato – Crowdbooks Publishing

Live in Paris gets us lost in the meanders of that inscrutable and intangible essence that runs through the French capital, but it surfaces in the stories I wanted to tell. Honorè de Balzac represented Paris as a bottomless ocean; I wanted to represent this literary image with a kind of visual vertigo contained in all the aesthetic-formal fragments in the book.

Live in Paris Book – Michele Di Donato – Crowdbooks Publishing

Underlying all the micro-stories told is the synesthesia of poetry that makes these photographs an intimate symbolic formula of an ever-changing city. I wanted to enact a narrative and interpretive imagery made up of places, things, and people, which come alive in scenes that are both icastic and achievable in the endless sequence of images that is life.

Live in Paris Book – Michele Di Donato – Crowdbooks Publishing

I let myself be amazed by everything the city could offer me, I let myself be enchanted by the colors, the dynamism of people, the ironic and unusual intersections.

Live in Paris Book – Michele Di Donato – Crowdbooks Publishing

To do this I was largely helped by my artistic-cultural references, namely Wenders, Lynch, Tuymans, Bacon, Freud. But also Sartre, Proust, Balzac, so empathy, projection, imagination: these are the formulas I used to feed my gaze almost overwhelmed by chance encounters in the streets teeming with life, visual poetry and intimate narrative light.

Live in Paris Book – Michele Di Donato – Crowdbooks Publishing

It was cathartic, for my soul and my eyes, to dive into this ocean and travel it without being able to find the bottom. Paris made me realize that no matter how great the care one takes in traversing it, in describing it, no matter how numerous and interesting the explorers of this sea, “one will always find there a virgin place, an unknown place populated by flowers, pearls, monsters; something unheard of, in short, forgotten by divers literary visitors.” A quote that reminds us once again how Paris is an enchanting and inexhaustible source of inspiration, which is why it is impossible to unveil and know all the way.

Book Specifications

Width:16,5cm
Height:24cm
Pages:132
Cover:Copertina morbida
Language:Italiano, English

Author Informations

NameMichele Di Donato
Country Italia
Websitehttps://www.micheledidonato.com/

Biography

MICHELE DI DONATO

Born in San Severo (FG) 1968, is photographer and photography lecturer, expert in communication and marketing, has been involved in photography since the 1990s. He regularly conducts workshops, in different educational settings, on photographic storytelling, visual communication and image reading. Portfolio reader in numerous photography festivals, in 2018 he was selected by the S.A.C.S. Archive of the Regional Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art – Museo Riso in Palermo. He is a founding member of HANGAR Fotografico – Independent Photographic Training.

His activity as a photographer has enabled him to receive national and international awards including the Moscow International Foto Award 2015, 2016, 2020 in RUSSIA and the SONY WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY AWARD 2017 in which he received the honor of “Commended as Top 50 in the World” in the Open Architecture category.

Michele Di Donato’s photographic work is based on different types of research: conceptual, metaphysical, abstract, expressionist, documentary and narrative. His photographs open wide margins of reflection on anthropological, social, artistic and aesthetic issues such as those of space, identity, otherness, relationality, imagination, imaginary. Michele Di Donato’s photographic production, rich in artistic, cinematographic and literary quotations, is the bearer of an imaginal surplus that acts in the viewer, who finds himself in a synaesthetic dialogue with the photograph, confronting it through evocations, suggestions and continuous imaginations

Michele Di Donato’s images have been published in MAGAZINES such as Reflex, Foto CULT, Cities, Die Angst Munich, L’Oeil de la Photographie Paris, F-STOP Magazine, Spectrum, Gente di Fotografia, Edge of Humanity Magazine Usa, are part of many private collections and have been exhibited in numerous solo EXHIBITIONS worldwide.

He collaborates with several companies as product and advertising photographer, such as Air Dolomiti, BNP Paribas-Italy, SNDesign Italia, ArtLINK Luxury Cruise Ship.

  • Editorial Publications

• Michele Di Donato 2018, “Metapolis. La stasi della presenza nelle solitudini dello spazio”, Roma PRESSUP, ISBN 978-1-38-951338-1, exhibition catalog with texts by Fabiola Di Maggio

• Michele Di Donato 2018, “Fautographie”, edited by Fabiola Di Maggio, ISBN 978-1-38-946725-7

• Michele Di Donato 2019, “Lost/Found”, Roma PRESSUP, limited edition

• Michele Di Donato 2019, “nonluoghi”, edited by Fabiola Di Maggio, Roma PRESSUP, , exhibition catalog with texts by Fabiola Di Maggio

• Michele Di Donato 2019, “XXX-Red Light Tour”, Roma PRESSUP, limited edition

• Michele Di Donato 2019, “The sound of silence”, Roma PRESSUP, limited edition

• Michele Di Donato 2020, “Brain Damage”, edited by Fabiola Di Maggio, The DEAD ARTISTS SOCIETY, ISBN 978-88-943619-7-1

This book has been successfully funded and will be sent to print soon. if you are a backer you'll get email notifications for each step until it's shipped.

Please Wait...