WHAT DO YOU SEE?
THE PECULIAR AND SOFTLY BEAUTIFUL PHOTOGRAPHY OF ANA PAULA TIZZI
Is what you see all that there is? Can an image in which fingers move and cups empty count as a picture or as a movie or as something eerie and in between? Do the ghosts of movement drawn in thin lines or superimposed onto still backgrounds speak more to the reality of a place than that of someone shown in a single action? These are some of the many enthralling questions the viewer is allowed to answer and engage with when looking at the work of Ana Paula Tizzi. Her work is heavily based on Street Photography and Documentary Photography, in which she tends to capture the purest human behavior and raw emotions with the aim of enabling pure, impromptu reactions, moments and feelings with a touch of humor of our everyday life. Whether she is photographing people on the street through a one way window, playing with duality and mirror images with twins or documenting New York streets full of drunken Santas, Ana images are always layered with both meaning and color and texture and form.
Untitled #2, New York. 2020. Pigment print with charcoal. 24 x 36 inches.
Born in Sao Paolo, Brazil, unlike some of the other artists featured in our publication, Ana had a less direct path to art making. Ana says of her childhood, “I grew up in a business family, where I was educated to become a very successful business woman.” On a more traditional track, Ana graduated with a degree in economic political studies and international relations, with a specialty in international law. However, in the midst of finishing another business degree, she started to get very bored with her life, a life in which she says all her time was taken up between the office and the university and back again. To add some flair to the routine of her day to day, she started to take pictures. This hobby and her newly discovered talent as a photographer quickly became much more than just that, as her friends started to ask her to photograph their small businesses for promotion. Soon word spread and she had more and more clients and people started looking at her work as art. Suddenly, Ana says, “I started to change how I saw myself in the future.” At first, she was nervous to tell her family that she planned to become an artist thus, completely rearranging her life, but her worries were in vain as her family encouraged her to follow her dreams, they were supportive and excited about her art.
Subway, New York. 2020. Pigment print with charcoal. 24 x 36 inches.
Since deciding to be an artist, Ana has received a certificate in photography from the New York Film Academy as well as a Masters of Professional Studies in Digital Photography from the New York School of Visual Arts. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions all over the world from the Dominican Republic to Brazil, from Paris to New York. Ana says of her artistic process, “I’m very attached to little moments in life, my memories and my family are my biggest inspirations. My process of creating is to merge my past with my future and be able to create my own worlds with my expectations, regrets and lessons.” Her work speaks to these little moments, and she has the wonderful ability to capture microexpressions and making the mundane of everyday suddenly filled with lust and life and love. Ana’s current project is a photographic investigation into absence, based on her own memories and feelings of loss and longing.
With an international eye for the subtly emotional and intricate, as well as for filling the space of a seemingly empty frame with life and feeling, no matter the subject or the location you can be sure that Ana Paula Tizzi’s work will give you chills and make you look twice at the everyday work around you. And isn’t that the tell of great art, that it shapes your own world into the image the artist has painted? Look no further for this sort of respite from the seemingly unremarkable than Ana’s work, as through it one can realize the potential for beauty and longing in everything around.
ANA PAULA TIZZI
BRAZIL
www.aptizzi.com
