Who's behind the camera?

Photography is my personal journal, a way for me to process emotions and explore all the different identities I carry, shaped by my mixed heritage and a life that’s always been in motion.

I was born in Paris, the daughter of two adventurous and creative souls: my mother from Imola, Italy, and my father from Guadeloupe in the French West Indies. I think that my first language was movement : moving between countries, languages, cultures, and homes. I grew up in Washington DC, spent years in Montpellier and Paris, and I now live in Rome. Somehow I’ve always felt both rooted and uprooted, always searching for the thread that connects all these versions of “home.”

Losing my mom when I was six left a big absence in my story. I turned to my imagination often to fill in the gaps and find answers. Something my dad might not realize is just how much his travels helped shape that imagination : his stories and art gifts he would bring back filled my world with curiosity and sparked my own desire to go out and discover the world for myself.
Meanwhile, at home, out of need to reconnect the pieces, I’d spend hours digging through our (truly endless) boxes of old family photos, trying to figure out who was who, who went where, and how we all fit together. Those boxes became my way of holding on to faces and feelings I didn’t yet have words for.

At 22, I picked up my first camera not because I had technical ambitions, but out of pure curiosity (and honestly, because I loved the sound of the “click”).
My very first photos were of my best friend Laurence, taken during one of our dinner dates. That night, with both of us laughing across the table, I realized that photography wasn’t about perfection (and let’s be honest, I had no idea what I was doing technically!). It was about noticing the things most people overlook: the way the light hit the back of the restaurant, the color contrasts, Laurence’s expression, so perfectly capturing the emotions we were sharing. Even the blurriness of the photo seemed to say something about her movement and energy.
I found myself drawn to those subtle details that, at first glance, might seem ordinary, but if you really look, become absolutely unique and so true to that moment.

Since then, every photo I take is like a page from my journal, a silent conversation with the world and with myself. Through this ongoing process, I’ve come to see that identity isn’t fixed; it’s more like a mosaic made up of fragments. In this way, photography has become my lifeline, helping me map the ever-shifting borders of my own evolving identity.

Tania Palmier Gherardi