Interview with an Artist
Created | Updated Aug 15, 2010
Marta Bevacqua is a young photographer who succeeds in capturing worlds and stories in her pictures. Like Alice following the White Rabbit, I had no idea what was awaiting me the first time I followed a linked picture to her DeviantArt account.
And what a mind-blowing feast of elaborate simplicity, surreal reality, and poetry of all senses that was! Sometimes I wish I could find myself in the world of her photographs. Or am I already?
toybox: Would you like first to write a few words about yourself, tell a bit the readers who you are?
Marta Bevacqua: I was born in Rome, 1989. I’m studying photography, attending an evening course in a school here in Rome, but I am mostly self taught.
I’m an emerging photographer, on the road to become a professional one.
toybox: It seems that you started taking photographs relatively late (not, like, when you were 6 or so). What made you start, and how did you find out this is what you wanted to do for living?
Marta Bevacqua: I started taking photographs when I was 16. I just found a site for every kind of art (DeviantArt) and discovered how much I loved seeing beautiful images, especially photographs. I passed one month browsing trough this site, I started to admire the works of different artists, then I started to imagine beautiful images in my mind. In that period I neither had a camera, only a bad one (that didn’t work so well, it also turned off by itself) and I started with that. After some time, I had my first professional camera, and I knew that it was my passion and it will be so also in the future.
toybox: How would you describe your style? What do you like to express with your pictures?
Marta Bevacqua: I think my style is nearly a dreamy one. I love creating surreal images or scenes in my mind and make them become real in a photograph.
Sometimes I represent a concept, objective or subjective, other times I just try to create a beautiful image, that becomes a "pleasure" for eyes.
I simply try to transport the "public" beyond the reality, that photography reproduces almost faithfully.
toybox: How do you create photographs? How much work is involved from the conception to the final picture?
Marta Bevacqua: Most of the times I’ve something in mind and I try to represent it as I developed it with my imagination. In these cases, I usually work a lot on the idea firstly and then on the shot, thinking about everything: composition, models, make up and hairstyle, etc and finally the post production.
Other times, I just go around with my camera, and I find beautiful things or scenes everywhere (just be careful to see how beautiful is the world we live in), from a small flower, to a lightning in the sky, or to a lot of people doing something, somewhere.
toybox: What and who inspires you?
Marta Bevacqua: I am mostly inspired by nature, always. Rain, snow, sunset light, trees, leaves, grass: I think everything has a little world to hide, and everything has a little thing to offer to make a photograph become something beautiful.
I am also inspired by other photographers I find great, especially Zhang Jingna, for her "fantasy" shots, Julie Blackmon, for her constructed shots and Annie Leibovitz.
toybox: What would you say are the important aspects of a photograph?
Marta Bevacqua: I think there aren't specific important aspects of a photograph. Colours are not more important than composition, and the dress used by the model is not less important than the location (for example). A photograph is composed by a lot of important elements. A photo becomes a beautiful image when it has the right colours, composition, models, make-up, dress and everything else.
toybox: In your opinion, what is the meaning of photography?
Marta Bevacqua: I love photography as an art, besides for being "my art", also because it has a lot of different meanings. There are several fields in which photography plays an important role. For example: in reportage photography is used to report something, in this way photography can document history. Or for fashion, the function of photography is to show a product and with a beautiful image it's supposed to sell that specific product.
I use photography to create beauty, and what I love most about it is that photography reproduces reality faithfully, and make the viewers understand the beauty is here, everywhere.
toybox: You also make drawings. How would you compare photography to drawing, and other graphical art in general?
Marta Bevacqua: I think drawing and other graphical arts are more free. If you have something in mind, also things so far from reality, you can represent them just drawing. Photography catches the reality, and for this reason I consider it as a "more difficult" way to represent surreal and magical scenes. But besides it, photography gives a lot of possibilities, as every kind of art.
toybox: Let us look at the future – do you have any long-term plans, specific projects and dreams you would like to share with us?
Marta Bevacqua: My dream is to become a professional photographer (and quite famous... 
). What I’d like most for my future is travel a lot for my work as a photographer.
toybox: And finally, do you have anything to add for the benefit of our readers?
Marta Bevacqua: Just support me! 
toybox with Marta Bevacqua
