Nicolas Ghirlando.
Documentary Photographer.

Around Here.
To document the everyday is as worthwhile a practice as documenting the extraordinary and the epic. What feels prosaic or parochial to one person may fascinate someone else the on other side of the world.

There is always something of interest to be found wherever you look, a story to be found in a discarded paper bag or an unfinished cup of tea.
My work explores the places and moments we tend to ignore because they are so woven into our daily life that we don’t really look at them, even though we see them. To me, this form of documentary photography. The familiar becomes ignored after a while but if you keep looking you will often see something different, something you may not have noticed before or paid any attention to.
I try and treat each day as if I were new to the place. To look at the world around me, the streets I walk in, the house I live in, the roads I drive down as if it were a foreign city. I always carry a couple of cameras with me —even they don’t even come out of the bag— it means I am primed to look for moments to document and stories to communicate.
My work is made with a wide variety of old film cameras, 35mm and medium format. For me, the process of making work with film slows me down, helps me look deeper and removes the instant gratification. To me it also feels more magical, more tangible; the physical trapping of light, a way of it permanently keeping it as an artefact.

 All photography is documentary photography in some ways, and through my work I try to find images and vignettes that elevate the everyday into something worth preserving and communicating. After all, in the future, we will look back at these moments and these images become a means of time travel. These are the good old days.
https://www.nicolasghirlando.co.uk/