Ventura Formicone

Carrying Identities

Ideologies and the cultural values of societies that we are born into shape different sets of identities. We carry them with pride, shame and the whole range of emotions in-between these two extremes. Nevertheless, the merging of all these identities is what creates the uniqueness of the human experience, and without them we will be lost. In a particular moment in time when it seemed that there was a growing incapacity to understand the importance of difference, I found myself at different intersections of New York, where thousands of these identities interact and melt together everyday. Crossing these street, walking incessantly, I created a series of snapshots of the diversity that surrounds us.

Photographer

Ventura Formicone

Ventura was born in Notaresco, a little village in the hills between the Gran Sasso mountain and the Adriatic Sea. After completing secondary school, Ventura moved to Bologna to study agronomy at university. In those formative years at university he become interested in photography, and produced his first professional works as a photographer. After completing his degree at the university, Ventura moved to Madrid, where he started to explore and develop his photographic language. Ten years ago, he started to work in the field of development in collaboration with several NGOs and UN agencies, with a focus on the Middle East. Ventura has held several exhibitions of his work, including "Suspended Lives", a controversial work on Palestinian women political prisoners, which was launched in Madrid in 2011.
He is currently based in Istanbul.

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