Hi, I’m Ricci – a coddiwompling polymath with too many tabs open, hobbies, interests and a camera I pretend to understand. Adrift in the chaos and searching for meaning, I occasionally take pics of things and stuff.
I started taking pics as a teenager in the late ’80s, a time when photography was an expensive hobby, especially with film cameras offering only 12 or 24 shots per roll. My curiosity in capturing moments was nurtured by my interest in the arts of framing and composition. A neighbour, a teacher whose hobby was documenting our hometown’s development, saw potential in me. He generously offered me outdated development equipment from the sixties, along with a book on photo development techniques.
Auto-didactically mastering these techniques, I delved into various experiments. I even constructed a wooden box with a pinhole for daguerreotype experiments and dabbled in multiple exposures. I was incentivised by my parents’ condition that I maintain good school grades in exchange for film rolls (my parents, staunch advocates of academic excellence, struck a deal with me: good grades in exchange for rolls of film. A bargain that would seem alien to the smartphone-toting generation of today…).
In my makeshift darkroom (improvised in my parental home’s bathroom), I experimented. My world became a whirl of chemical baths and red lights, a magician’s cave where time stood still and images came to life.
During school years, my lens first focused on the intimate – my girlfriends, friends, classmates – framing their youth in action sports and urban landscapes. My style evolved, flirting with minimalism, abstract photography, and the unchained spirit of lomography.
My story, much like my photographs, is a mosaic of moments, ideas, and evolutions, framed in the unpredictable and often absurd journey of life.
During the transition into the new millennium, influenced by grunge and skate cultures, and not averse to any underground scene, I slowly carved myself a niche in action photography. I practiced my passion on planet skydive as “Spaceboy”. For 11 years, I specialised in freefall photography/videography and captured the adrenaline-fuelled world of skydiving and base jumping. A feat that required a complex and cumbersome camera helmet setup (with a tongue switch held with the teeth to activate the shutter), vastly different from today’s era of high-resolution 360° mini action cameras (no more framing etc needed!).
I closely follow the technological evolution in photography, transitioning from film to digital, and later to smartphone and AI-generated imagery (also check out ricci.black). My work reflects the general development of photography and its growing accessibility. Despite the challenges posed by smartphones’ ubiquity, I try to maintain my unique artistic voice while taking pics.
DON’T CLICK ON THE RED DOT!!!