I was born in Bolzano, Italy, a small city in the Italian Alps, and immigrated to Brooklyn, New York when I was eight years old. When I came to the United States I experienced the conflict of negotiating an identity between two cultures. This sense of feeling like an outsider led me to become an obsessive observer of people and conscious of differences in how people lived their lives. It eventually led me to study anthropology, which has informed my whole way of seeing and understanding people.
Documentary photography has been my passport to meeting and learning about many different kinds of people. I like to hang out, build relationships, and immerse myself in the day-to-day world of the people I photograph, gaining a close and intimate familiarity with them and their environment. My photographic work’s central theme is about individuals outside the mainstream of the larger society. Some of the subjects I have photographed include punks, skinheads, inner-city youth, gang members, and immigrants. I explore how individuals who, either by choice or because they are seen as the “other” live outside the dominant culture. My photographs aim to capture how individuals shape their identity, fend off alienation, and give voice to their existence.
