Giulia Parlato

Cinematic photography from an Italian LCC undergrad

Hailing from Palermo, the capital of Italian island Sicily, comes Giulia Parlato. Prioritising a “simple, genuine, organic” photographic style, Giulia uses portraiture and still life imagery to investigate the human soul, specifically tapping into the sacred, revered institution of the Family. This interest in domesticity and the relationships that come with it is channelled by exploring themes such as household, brotherhood, youth and estrangement, and having left Sicily to study at LCC, these are themes she is right at home with.

Giulia told us: “every time I come back home it is as if I’m also going back to my childhood…every room is a projection of our thoughts, our fears and our obsessions”. Each visit therefore takes on a quasi-cathartic role, the nostalgia healing the wounds of separation: “we always need to go back to our temples and to our sea”.

Thankfully, Giulia does justice to such a passionate stimulus, relishing in the intimacy that working with family members creates. Sometimes, it’s the awkwardness that her subjects display that forms the basis of an image, with each winced pose expressing ever more closeness.

Besides her photography degree – which she tells us taught her how to think and talk about her intriguing work – Giulia has interned on the film sets of Italian films Salvo and Il Racconto dei Racconti (Tale of Tales). Recalling, for instance, a dreamlike quality that she observed during a scene of Il Racconto dei Racconti, she told us how she now looks to incorporate cinematic lighting into her photography, aware as she is of the incredible atmosphere it can create.

The beautiful palettes of her Isola series below are achieved as a result of this consideration, but Giulia has also been strongly influenced by Gaston Bachelard’s La Poétique de l’ Espace and Peter Schwenger’s Tears of Things. In her own succinct words: “what we see is also what we have studied and what we know”. We couldn’t agree more.

giuliaparlato.com