Today we’d like to introduce you to Cristiana Motta.
Hi Cristiana, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I got my first camera from my dad when I was 15. He always photographed our family and I started photographing everyone around me and never stopped. In college, I followed a law career and distanced myself from photography a little but 10 years ago I felt the urge to connect more and work with what I loved the most, which was photography.
I started by photographing my friends at their events, such as baptisms, births, and parties and then I was photographing friends of friends.
I decided to come live in Florida with my family in 2019 and with the quarantine, I started to be part of a photography group Visual Literacy led by Roberta Tavares, a photography specialist.
The classes helped me to develop my look and my documentary and fine art narrative in photography and today with the growth of personal projects I am part of the Alfaagency agency that came from students who developed for the photojournalistic market of Literacy.
My first project Instants started in quarantine, where I photograph my daughters in motion, with low camera speed to capture what I felt to be with them and how time passes quickly and we can only feel moments of a moment and how it is necessary to document them for the future. But I wanted to document this childhood in a different way than usual because the commercial documentary I already had I wanted something different that would make people connect in sensations in a subjective way as I feel life, without answers without right and wrong, just feel each one with its history and life.
My second personal project take care of your memories started with the loss of my father and I couldn’t go to Brazil because we still didn’t have the covid vaccine. At that moment I found myself in a very sad place, where I had never been before. The pain reconnected me with my childhood and soon I was closer to my paternal grandmother who now lives with my mother and sister, facilitating our conversations via face time. I had some difficulties with my father and we diverged a lot and ended up distancing ourselves. My paternal grandmother Nelly has had Alzheimer’s for 6 years and I follow his development by removing all his memory.
The project is a way of being close to her even far away since she is sometimes here and sometimes not. It was the way I think I found not to distance myself from my father and somehow the project filled my heart and helped me face the difficult time.
I felt the need to meet and live with other elderly people with Alzheimer’s here in Lake Mary to better understand what was happening to her and to be able to do a respectful and true project.
The Take care of your memories project is a thank you for all the love and life my grandmother gave me, it’s our conversations and my past that I want to keep and protect so that nothing takes away from me.
Over time I started to get closer to the elderly at home here in Lake Mary and when I saw it I was already writing and connecting more with their stories and my third project The Home was born, in this project in a different way than I did for my grandmother, I want to make people feel that this disease takes the stories, the memory but it cannot take the love and these people urgently need attention and love because I believe that inside they are still feeling and struggling several times in a day to belong to something and be part of a story. This documentary needs to connect the family so that they don’t give up on those who are by their side with Alzheimer’s because they are still here.
I have some pleasures in life, one of them is living with my family and friends, the other is photographing and feeling, people and life.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The difficulty of photographing my grandmother from a distance led me to the path of college using our old photos and making the project richer and more personal.
I believe that difficulty always helps to evolve and I am grateful for never having been a smooth path, because only then could I grow emotionally and professionally.
You have to feel pain to appreciate happiness.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I started with commercial work for parties, events, births, weddings, and today I work alongside my personal projects that end up interacting with my commercial and this makes me feel that I have found myself and that I have my own narrative and style.
How do you define success?
Success for me is having happiness in everything you do, being able to live and work with what you like and identify with, being able to be recognized professionally in what you believe you were born to do, in your life purpose. Success for me is having health, family, love, peace, and a job that you love to do and can affect the world in a good way.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crismottaphotos/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Crismottaphotographer
Image Credits
cris motta photos
