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Giorgi Shengelia

Photographer

Giorgi Shengelia

The invisible side of Tbilisi

At night, In Tbilisi, while walking around you may come across a reality that is different from the real world. Such a feeling came to me when I first met a homeless person, who was sleeping in the street. When I returned home, I was thinking for a long time about him and I've decided to depict that reality in my pictures, despite its complexity.
It took a few years to search for, and take images of the homeless people with the different experiences of living in the streets, either because of the personal drama or mostly because of the consequences of the civil war and Russian occupation with common features. me living place at all, I reckon that, after a while, time may erase even the unbearable state of the poverty, but I consider that, without acknowledgment of the problem, even time cannot cure the traumatic experiences of the past.

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.