About Ricci

In a world where every click of the shutter is a chance to capture a fleeting moment, I (Tom aka ‘Ricci’) stand as a testament to the relentless pursuit of passion, creativity, and the ever-changing landscape of photography. My story, much like my photographs, is a mosaic of moments, ideas, and evolutions, framed in the unpredictable and often absurd journey of life.

Born in 1978, my journey into photography began in my early childhood during a seemingly ordinary zoo visit with my beloved grandmother where I snapped my first photograph – a majestic tiger – using her old-school analog camera. Somehow this serendipitous moment sparked an undying passion for photography in me.

Not long after, I received an old, quite worn, film camera from my uncle who upgraded his equipment. This was 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 a neighbour, a teacher whose hobby was documenting our hometown’s development. This neighbour saw potential in me and generously offered me outdated development equipment from the sixties, along with a book on photo development techniques.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, 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 the solace of 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. Skateboards and rollerblades, rock faces and snow caps, all danced through my viewfinder. My style evolved, flirting with minimalism, abstract photography, and the unchained spirit of lomography. Puberty dreams of photographing naked Models on the Seychelles’ beaches for the Playboy Magazine or capturing the raw chaos of war zones fuelled my aspirations. But life, as in photography, develops in unexpected ways…

During the transition into the new millennium, influenced by grunge and skate cultures, and not averse to the underground sex & drug scene, I slowly carved myself a niche in action photography offering my services on planet skydive as “Spaceboy”. For 11 years, I specialised in freefall photography 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), vastly different from today’s era of high-resolution mini action cameras.

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. My diverse body of work not only showcases my technical skills but also my deep connection to the changing world around me. Let’s shoot what the future reserves for us!