BIOGRAPHY

Christophe Casamassima (b. 1977) spent over 20 years editing and publishing Furniture Press Books, a small poetry press focusing on underrepresented and burgeoning writers, before he picked up a camera and saw, finally, without words. He is a contemporary Italian-American photographer who produces imagery informed by the unconscious, dreams; self-awareness, the self-conscious individual in the crowd, the sudden awareness of being (seen); the understated experience and wisdom of children, birds and their cautious routines, dogs and their spasmodic energies; the untold story of human faces, landscapes and their hidden histories, the subject between subject and background; and the joyful errors of missed focus. His work resides outside the trap of mimicry and mimesis, and is focused on a certain faith that what is unseen is only so because most lack the patience to see, or, in the words of Jonathan Swift, "Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others." Casamassima holds only to one vision: "I take my photography to be something like the moment when a sound in the environment, birdsong, let's say, and the spiraling brilliance of a child's aimless narrative suddenly become a melodic accompaniment to the beat of an ambulance treading over potholes: what is seen and how it is seen awaken in the viewer a sense that seeing is wanting to see, that it is inevitable and, hopefully, unavoidable." He is currently the Vice President and Programs Manager of The Baltimore Camera Club, the oldest and longest continually-running photography club in the USA, and on the faculty of Towson University's Electronic Media & Film department. 

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