HYPERREALISTIC PHOTOGRAPHY AS LANGUAGE FULL OF LOVE

Daniele Butera Photographer, based in Rome, is born in Palermo in 1976. Initially his professional life consisted in consulting and business training in the field of communication and marketing. Over the years, he has managed to combine his professional skills with his great passion for photography. The meeting and collaboration with some of the most important Italian photographers and the evolution of the web and new media have given him a more complete approach to Photography and Visual Communication. He has been working in it for almost 10 years.

Daniele has carried out various advertising campaigns, published in national newspapers such as RCS and Mondadori, as well as created photographic services for various Italian and international companies, for professionals, actresses and actors or great chefs (Cracco). Since 2012 he has been a lecturer in Personal Branding and Visual Communication at ITSSI (Higher Technical Institute for Business Services) in Viterbo (Lazio region). In 2016 he was a lecturer in Photography at the IAC Design in Rome as part of the Editorial Graphics course.

I met Daniele at his home in Castelnuovo di Porto, near Rome, with his lovely wife and 3 cats. What most caught my attention was the photographer’s personality. He was talking about his art and hyperrealism technique with such passion that it moved my heart. “Photography is my first love, it is a language. Hyperrealism is love for detail. Everything I do, I do with love. The energy of my models provokes this love in me. Love moves everything in the world, moves our emotions, all there is in the air”. More about Daniele at @danielebuteraphotography and www.danielebutera.com.

What does mean photography for you?

Photography is my first love. I have been photographing since I’m 12. For me, it is a language. I started to communicate with people using photography. For me photography is also telling stories.

Why did you choose portrait and your “hyperrealistic” style?

I chose this kind of photography because I do love people and telling their stories. For me every portrait tells a lot about my subject, their life, their emotions, fears and dreams. My style is a natural consequence of my first “love”, which is my father’s camera Nikon and the 50mm it was mounted on, and a goal that I “achieved” with my experiences and studies.

A portrait is not only a photography: it is a kind of magic between two people, with a camera placed there to narrate that alchemy.

What is your vision, your philosophy?

Less is more. That is my “mantra”. I know, maybe it is trivial but I do think that a perfect portrait is created by the subjects themselves and nothing more is needed to tell their story, except strong empathy with the photographer, whose only job is to put them in that comfort zone, where the magic happens.

Who do you photograph? Who are your models?

As I’ve already said, I have loved photographing people, since I was 12 when I took camera in my hands for the first time. I’m an “anthropological traveller”: every shooting session is a journey for me, where I’m a sort of “Virgil” taking his lost travel companion to a safe place, where they can be free to express what is inside. That is the moment the shutter and strobes start to strafe. That is the moment I discover another part of myself, of my soul.

How did you happen to become a photographer?

I don’t think that it “happened”, I think it was something in my DNA. My father and my uncle are very good amateur black and white photographers and, as a child, looking at their pictures of the Sicilian countryside or Africa, I immediately felt the inner need to emulate them and be able to stop time and catch people’s soul as they used to do for years. Soon I started discovering the alchemy that we can find in waiting to press the shutter to take a picture, the magic consists in waiting for the chemicals to reveal the image in the darkroom, to see people be moved by a picture. I still remember when, for the first time, I saw an actress looking at a portrait I had shot of her, just a few minutes earlier, and when, with unexpected bright eyes, she said: ”That’s ME! No one else before has shot a picture like this…”. That became the real goal of my career: moving people with my images, letting them find some fun in posing for a picture and achieve some kind of “peace” with their image as seen through a lens.

Why did you choose for JL Interviews the following photographs?

I chose this pictures because I think that they changed something inside me and they let me understand more about what I was really looking for. In some way, they influenced my “signature”, my style, my way of telling stories.

Written by Joanna Longawa

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