Emanuela Franchini

Her photography consists of a series of self-portraits that forces the observer to re-evaluate their home environment and question their place in it. The viewer has to assess their relationship with their most basic surroundings, seeing themselves as an integral part of it and not an external component.

‘I perceive the world in a twisted way. My reality is twisted, because I find normal reality boring. I try to recreate real moments that I’m twisting in my brain.’ And this twisted reality is a re-ordering of the space around her in a surrealistic way, so that she can ‘look at things from a different angle and go beyond the normal context’ that she finds them in.

Emanuela’s self portraits are not set around the human as the central controlling theme, as one would expect, but are focused on the objects around them. The idea is to show that the relationship with these objects is far from superficial. At times there is almost a sense of love between the object and the owner, so that the home environment becomes personified by the mere existence of the human who occupies it.

‘We are intimate with all the objects around us. We keep them close to our bodies and there is always a physical interaction with these objects, which is a lot more intimate than we realise. I bring a glass to my lips, the same way I might kiss a lover, but we don’t say we are in love with the glass.’

Her keen insight into the relationship between the inanimate world around her and the human presence which brings it to life will make the viewer take a deeper look at the fundamental objects that make up their lives. She believes that people should pay more attention to the reality around them, and her photography is a way of allowing people to view the world with new eyes.

Emanuela’s images are intended to challenge perceptions, because ‘what you see in the picture tells you a lot about yourself’. She is interested in the thought process that gets the viewer to their resting place of understanding when confronted with one of her images.

Emanuela Franchini’s photography is still life, with a dash of human interaction and a slice of twisted reality.

Her Photography Bibliography

Her passion for photography started with an Agfa that her father owned and that she coveted as a child. When she was eight her parents bought her a Kodak pocket camera and Emanuela’s exploration of the photographic world started. After experimenting one night with reflections in her bathroom mirror her unique view of self portraiture was born, which has been consistently acknowledged for their re-evaluation of the genre.

In July 2007 this unique view was recognised by the New York band The Strokes, who used her image entitled Cheap 70’s Porn on the homepage of their website. Further recognition swiftly followed when in 2008 the Sony World Photography Awards selected her image Low Tide for their website to advertise the photographic award.

In the same year three of her images were published in the online art magazine Platform58 and Toro Magazine have published an interview together with some of her self-portraits in the January 2009 issue.

In February 2009 Emanuela became a ‘Royal Photographer’, being commissioned by the Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League to shoot a portrait of Prince Philip. And shortly after earning this accolade, seven of her images were published in an art booklet by Signum Art Publishing (Italy).

She has contributed to a joint exhibition with the photographer Cristina Cocullo entitled Heterological Boundaries at the Mayfair Library in London, between March and April 2009, which was moved to the Foundry in London in October 2009, with the addition of new material. Within a month she took part in a group exhibition entitled Telling Tales at the Mayfair Library.

Her most recent credit was in June 2010, when one of her images was chosen to be exhibited in Io Mi Vedo Cosi (That's How I See Myself) organised by the Italian Photography Association, CIFA.