Nicole Verzaro was born in Rome in 1995, but spent her childhood between the United States and Sicily, places of the heart and of constant reference and comparison. It was in Palermo (2009) that she began her first photographic experiments. In love with a city she knows she must leave, she searches in the alleys of the Sicilian capital for the corners of light that will form his memories. Later, during a trip in Guatemala (2013) while reporting, she began to reflect on the meaning of her images. The decisive encounter occurs in Rome in 2017. While studying Philosophy at La Sapienza University, she attends the Photographic Academy of Rome. From that moment on the two disciplines will be inextricably linked for her: the ideas intercept her images and her shots her ideas. She concludes her academic career with the publication of her master's thesis Onto(photo)graphy: for a new topology of perception, where she investigates photography from an ontological point of view abandoning the usual aesthetic approach that bounds photography to be the alter ego of reality.
After her philosophical studies she lived two enriching experiences: in 2019, in Berlin, she discovers street photography and in 2022, at the International Center of Photography in New York, she experiments her ideas within a city that overflows with photography. If for some people street photography is considered a genre, for her it will be first and foremost a style. "For me, street photography is the opportunity to approach any element in a spontaneous, extemporaneous way. You only shoot in front of an encounter." Thus, the street approach is no longer limited to the "street" but can be found whenever the violence of an encounter occurs: "I also approach portraits and landscapes with street."
"Photographism", as she defines, is the practice proper to photography: pure participatory gesture, composition of bodies, the art of encountering and relating things. It is therefore in the body, even before the sight, that one can see.
"The photographic act is not a stance in front of the world and toward an object: it is from the darkest and most unreflective depths of the body that the photographic act is generated." N.V.
