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Giorgi Shengelia

Photographer

Giorgi Shengelia

Accidental portraits

Accidental portraits (2020) are a series of photographs inspired by a tragedy. “My family’s photo archive was destroyed in a fire a long time ago. Only a small number of burnt, torn, partially destroyed photographs remained. The small nostalgic photos inspired me to work on a new genre that would give me the same feelings as the photos that survived from the fire. I try to create this mood in accidental portraits that I see every day. When I browse through my old family album and touch the photographs, I feel some exceptional energy condensed in them. I always wanted to recreate this very effect of palpable, intimate experience in my photography. That’s the main reason I decided to print my shots under the red light. Darkroom is the best place for this type of experimentation. In this process I am discovering a hidden, parallel world that is very dear to me, especially, because we live in a digital era and in the deficiency of tangible photography.”

Giorgi Shengelia

Giorgi Shengelia was born in 1984 in Tbilisi, Georgia. He graduated in Power Engineering and Telecommunication from Georgian Technical University in 2006 and moved to Florence, Italy with his family. It was while living there that he developed his interest in art and photography and in 2012 he decided to follow the courses of photojournalism at Fondazione Studio Marangoni. After completing his first personal project (Four Rooms on everyday life of Georgian women migrants in Italy) he returned to Tbilisi where he works as a freelance photographer. In parallel with his documentary work, he develops a more plastic and more artisanal photography.