Mary Cimetta

Street photography is a state of mind.

It is a way to look at the ordinary and see the unusual in it,
to look at everyday situations and find a decisive moment in them,
to look at candid happenings and see iconic interactions
between people and their surroundings in them.

My name is Mary. I was born in 1977 in Bologna, where I live

trying to squeeze street photography between family and work.

Or rather the opposite.

myraincheck

marycimetta.wordpress.…

Mary is a street photographer in her own particular way.

She's an observer, yes, but a very mental one. And you can get this straightaway, even when watching her first pictures in b&w. But in her being a "conceptual" photographer quite often she reveals also a surreal character, even "comic", literally speaking.

When I began my "research" on the use of colour in Street photography, Mary was one of the first photographers willing to share her opinions about it with me, and basically she has already provided me with all the answers to my questions. I'll try to arrange them now in a more fluent way.

     1- I have noticed that lately you prefer colour, would you tell the reason behind this choice?

     2- A technical question, now. While for Khuram, Alphan and Luksz the particular light of the city where they work has an impact on their use of colour (The sunshine, the artificial light, the shadows) you work in a rather normal situation, you don't use flash and don't intensify your colours. How do you work? It's really your rendering, which I wouldn't define as "flat" because that's not the proper word for it, but which is without any shade and somehow looking as though even the brighter colours were merged in one single layer, which conveys to me this idea of a conceptual photography.

And then there is the fact that I prefer simple, basic compositions, with few elements and few colors. You'll hardly find more than 2-3 colors in my photos.

And now the ritual questions...

     3- Do you agree with this statement?

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”  – Ted Grant

This is a bit of a black and white vision, isn't it?
I don't think that colors make a photo commercial or shallow, and I don't think that black and white alone can turn a subject into an emotional or immortal one. As for the soul of a photo, it doesn't lie in the edit.

     4- Someone thinks that through certain colors we communicate certain emotions. when you shot do you think of this?

You, too, seem to have a particular preference for something: blue. Sky seems to be constantly present in your photography. And also red colour. Am I wrong? Why?

I am a head-in-the-clouds kind of person, so I guess the sky is my habitat Not to mention that the sky over Bologna is mostly a dull white, so when it happens to be blue I tend to cherish and immortalize the moment. I don't look for specific colors, what matters to me is the overall balance and harmony of the frame. As for the emotions, my photos are mostly positive, carefree, ironic, even childish. These are the emotions I want to convey, because this is the part of me I want to show, the part of me I want to keep in touch with. But this stands for both my color and black and white photos.

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

OUT OF THE BLUE – PROJECT

COLOR STREET PHOTOGRAPHY [1/8] and [1/4]

COLOR STREET PHOTOGRAPHY dA[3]: Lukasz K. Palka by Batsceba COLOR STREET PHOTOGRAPHY dA[4]: Mary Cimetta by Batsceba