Cinzia Camela
Over your Shoulder
Cinzia Camela was born in Ascoli Piceno and began photographing at the age of 17 with a manual reflex camera borrowed from her father (never retuned), to document the Italian International Tennis Championships in Rome.
In 1993 she is already working as a professional, collaborating with a publishing house in the Marche region that deals mainly with publications on the territory and video.
Among the most important events of this period is the group exhibition curated by Eleonora Olivetti and Giuliana Scimé “Immagini per una campagna elettorale” in 1994, the year in which an epochal change in the history of Italian politics was sensed. This was followed by an exhibition at the Ken Damy museum in Brescia, which then travelled to various Italian cities, and the 1st Canon prize for the best sports photo, a competition organized by PHOTO ITALIA magazine.
In 2003, through an agency in Milan, she approached fashion photography, working backstage at haute couture and pret-à-porter fashion shows, as well as cinema photography, appearing on the red carpets of the main festivals of the sector, Cannes, Venice, publishing her work in major Italian and foreign magazines.
2009 is the year of her first solo exhibition in Naples at the gallery Al Blu di Prussia: Beyond the screen. Snapshots from film festivals, curated by Mario Pellegrino, images made in the first ten years at the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals and the beginning of a collaboration as Voguistas, "Vogue Italy".
Many are the national and international awards won by Cinzia, as well as solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad, in various galleries, until Beyond the screen, as part of the celebrations of Matera European Capital of Culture 2019, invited by Matera International Photography, in the former San Rocco Hospital, curated by Valentina Rippa and Mario Pellegrino, under the patronage of MIBACT, t Fine Arts and Landscape of Basilicata, later exposed also in Sorrento, at Villa Fiorentino, promoted by the Sorrento Foundation.
In 2021 she was chosen by Gucci to photograph the fashion show in the film Aria, shot on the occasion of the centenary of the fashion house.
This selection of photographs, curated by Maria Savarese, traces Cinzia Camela's years of work backstage at fashion shows. Over your shoulder is, in fact, a specific pose that is asked of the subjects, who, portrayed from behind, turn their gaze, raising it over their shoulder, towards the person portraying them. All the artist's poetic emerges in these works, her conception of each backstage as the beginning of a performance, of a search for new aspects and sides while remaining in the same context; the waiting for the perfect moment when, in the midst of the confusion and the hustle and bustle, she can catch that thousandth of a second in which she can photograph the person and not the character, isolating them, as if all around was only silence, emptiness and intimacy.
