Luca Pace
I am an Italian-South African analog photographer currently based in Germany.
Immigrating to America shortly after being born,
I spent my childhood in & around various states such as California, Florida, North Carolina & Washington State.
Ten years later a decision to come back was made and I got to learn what home was like.
Path To Photography
I work as a Deckhand in the Super Yacht industry where I continuously travel, meet incredibly strange & beautiful people & visit the most shapely places in the world. I chose this line of work because I thought it had best suited my desire to be on the move & gain particular experiences I wanted that being stationary couldn't provide me with.
I started developing an interest in analog photography after my 1st Officer onboard during a crossing from Malta to The Maldives mentioned he shot 35mm film. I had no idea what that meant & so during our nights shifts through the Suez Canal & the Somalian Gulf of Aden we listened to podcasts on analog photography. After my day shifts I'd head back into my cabin to study film stocks & techniques, cameras, history, anything I could. I felt that I had found the medium in which I could best express myself with after trying attempts at many others.
After returning to Malta, we both jumped in a gondola & headed to Valletta to buy some film from Darkroom Malta before heading home to Cape Town where I picked up Penny, the Pentax K-1000 Barry down at Tothills sold me - Thanks Barry.
Creative Inception
Shortly after settling in I developed an interest in street art & graffiti after seeing local artists showcase their works on passing trains & walls around town & throughout the suburbs.
I then learned how quickly their work got taken down by local authority & felt a certain pressure to document the art before it was rapidly painted over.
Most places saw me climbing up to rooftops & scaffolding, creeping in abandoned houses & hopping trains to document the works.
Sticking to myself throughout my teens, I kept the habit of documenting the artworks & later filing them in my library of various street art & graffiti pieces of Cape Town. It seems this is what saw my interest in capturing fading material swell.
Focus Point
Driven to document & capture, I bought a fixie & cycled around the city compulsively to flesh out results of what I had been studying onboard.
I have always had an obsession with things which hold my full interest. Shortening the learning curve to see results as fast as possible has been a hallmark of mine. Tothills was instrumental in aiding my development as I could shoot a roll, drop it off at the shop & cycle back in an hour to check the negatives & then reshoot.
Conveniently located in downtown Cape Town,
I'd load up a roll & go shoot around the block where some of my favorite work was made.
My Style
I found I naturally gravitated towards shooting street photography after roaming the city trying to document the street art when I was younger.
I have always been an observer,
so looking into a view-finder was comforting.
I focus on shooting things which are on the way out.
Fleeting moments, pockets of expression. Sudden happenings.
There's a certain purity in these moments where I find the most honesty & richness in people.
I also shoot architecture with a focus on textures & spaces which resonate feeling or mood.
Landscapes for me are more challenging as I use them to depict a feeling or mood I have or even as a reference to a thought of something.
I am so grateful to have found analog photography.
I can only thank a 1st Officer on a crossing through the Indian Ocean & a Diamond Geezer at a film chemist corner shop in the heart of downtown Cape Town for this.
For those who took the time to read, I thank you too.
Inspiration
I find great inspiration in the works of Martha Cooper,
Fan Ho, Elliot Erwitt, Vivian Meyer, Bruce Davidson,
Robert Doisneau & Henri Cartier-Bresson.
