Teresa letizia Bontà

Photography was -
and is - an overwhelming passion that I had since I was a child, but
unfortunately I have never been able to develop seriously.
However, my profession constantly pushes me forward, in continuous
research, and above all to describe what I do with a natural predisposition to
openness and purity of language. I could never describe my work with
detachment, or with an impersonal attitude, it would be impossible for me;
talking about photography without getting excited, or without being able to
understand that photography itself has represented and represents for me
every day a cure for the soul, it is practically impossible for me.
My photographs are born with the intention of giving a melody to a note
without sound that has remained so for so long; photography for me
represents light, that light that manages in the most direct way to illuminate
every dark part that remains dark too often within us. In modern society
today there is too little time to understand the unpredictability of an emotion,
running forces you to listen too little to your self while the emotions
themselves should take life more often on that stage that we all have inside. If
we stop for a moment to reflect, we realize that photography makes us
understand how much some emotions that break your heart, can also be the
same that manage to heal it.
I have always sought a privileged position to enjoy the spectacle of logic that
crashes against the very meaning of the word emotion, and this is why I am
strongly linked to every project that comes from the deep, which rises like a
small light from those inner rooms that we often refuse to explore. The
project to develop an emotion was born to shout, to send a message; when I
think about how some of my shots are born or to answer someone who asks
me this question, I reflect and realize how much the moon has never knocked
on my door, but it is always filtered forcefully through the closed shutters.
These closed rooms of our self, and in this specific case of mine, are slowly
discovered; but in that slowly on a personal level I decided to give light
through my artistic and photographic journey, lightening them, making them
practicable.
My photographs, often in black and white, tell a phase of my life lived in a
very strong and impactful way, especially on an inner level. Photographer
mainly Sicilian Street, artistic nude and naked of the soul.
My approach to artistic nude and soul photography is based precisely on this,
on the depth of the emotions that I explore and immediately impress with
instant drafts and drawings, which slowly become a figure when the
compositional lucidity takes over making me identify the cardinal subject of
the work. Immediately after the void, the pressure that empties you of every
vision that serves to concentrate shortly after on just that, perfectly outlined
so that you can create strong links with the figure itself, with the model to be
portrayed. With the car, at that moment, I feel in perfect and total harmony
with art itself, loving it so much, as if I were at that juncture at home talking
in perfect synergy and friendship with my own emotions.
When I am instead in my beloved homeland, my Sicily, I calculate my
humus, I retrace my roots and start a passionate dialogue; in that area that I
seek with strength and love it is as if I were accompanied by a Sicilian woman
who represents its bowels, the pains, virtues, magic and its most rooted
taboos.
I chose to tell through my shots and therefore through photography, my pain
through the lives of others, in a personal cross-section of life lived in a very
strong way, when now in my professional lucidity at 40 years old, I
discovered the emotion of melting for a caress turned to the soul.