Luca Tombolini
Luca Tombolini was born in 1979 in Milan, Italy. He completed humanistic studies and after that a degree in Sciences of Communication, with a major on rhetoric patterns in Cinema. While studying at University he met with large format photography and started experimenting.
He is self-taught using the medium. He started photographing desert landscapes during long solo adventures following an unconscious desire that he later theorised as a need of a glimpse of a transcendent absolute. Of which nowadays society is more and more becoming oblivious.
He's a reader of C.G.Jung and Buddhist teachings. He explains, “Being alone in those remote areas, it’s a very humbling experience. It helps my mind to create a meditative suspension over the reality I perceive; cultural occurrences fade away leaving an apparent void which I try to fill in with shapes and colours of my photographic play”.
Exhibitions:
2020, SFO Museum, San Francisco
2020, IPE 162, Royal Photographic Society, RPH Bristol
2016, Photographers II, Galleria Ceribelli, Bergamo
2016, Affordable Art Fair, Love It Art, Hong Kong
2016, Modern Take, Love It Art, Vancouver
2015, Foreboding, Sans Oslo, Oslo
2015, Milano Arte Design, nHow, Milan
2014, The Plantation Journal, Library of Arts, Paris
What or who most influences your work?
- Hiroshi Sugimoto for his ability to enquire into the metaphysical through images, Massimo Vitali for the aesthetics of his photography and C.G. Jung for being the first to provide me with the tools to look into spirituality in a more conscious way.
Describe your photographic style for us in three words
- Purity, a-temporality, minimal.
Where is the most inspiring place you’ve travelled to and photographed in your career so far?
- Every place I’ve been is special, I really cannot choose one above the others. Even more so because you can see the pictures as the result, but they don’t show all the adventures that I’ve had while taking them, which in my mind add up to the perception of the place. But since The Woods features some pictures from my Iceland series - I can tell you that for sure living for a month in the Icelandic central plateau was mesmerising!
If you could own a print by any photographer, whose would it be and why?
- Following on from my answer to your first question - it would be a black and white seascape from Sugimoto, and a diptych of Vitali’s beaches to lighten up the living room. On opposing walls.
What has photography taught you about the world?
- The kind of photography I’m creating has taught me a way of travelling, and probably also of living. Due to my need for time to dedicate to photograph during my trips, I recognised the subtle pleasure of living for long amounts of time in specific off-route places where no one else would stop for more than few days.
In Morocco I remember arriving during summer 2016 in a tiny village near the Algerian border and staying there photographing a small patch of dunes nearby for three weeks. Once you decide to set up camp, the mind can slow down and start picking up the unseen details that make you remember how you lived in that place, rather than just passing by.
Browse Luca's work for sale here
Top to bottom: "LS VIII #113, Iceland, 2015", "LS VIII #100, Iceland, 2015" and "LS VIII #97, Iceland, 2015" by Luca Tombolini