Marina Prinzivalli, lives in between Pisa and Naples, where she was born in 1968.
An architect and professional photographer, ever since her youth she has developed an intimate relationship with photography, which she uses as an instrument of investigation and as an expressive means; a way to capture reality and make certain moments of life that sometimes memory happens to erase, everlasting.
She has enthusiastically committed herself to her work as a photographer, which she carries out with professional care, becoming impassioned to each and every one of her subjects, also proud of her background as an architect which has given her an essential constructive sensitivity.
She has a dynamic character with plenty of will power and she manages to join up her passion for travel, dancing, music, and sailing through photography, an essential means to process her life experience.
Davide Gasperi writes about her as follows.
In the photography by Marina Prinzivalli it is the visual play and an inexhaustible curiosity towards possible relations between objects 'whether they come out spontaneously or on the contrary, they must be constructed through the artifice of the photographic scene' that prevails.
A peculiar ability to instantaneously capture whatever may hold a photographic appeal, whether be it objects, bodies, clouds, shadows, is what is apparent, especially in her best pictures. It is in these instances that the way in which every production manipulation is employed to extract, amplify the qualities that can be either manifest or hidden, immediately available to be recorded, or in need of being constructed, can be appreciated. The angles employed, the compositional choices, shafts of light or tonal gradations, differences in scale, overlapping planes, or bodies; everything is employed to generate a spatiality masterly constructed and yet still able to appear fresh and immediate, never cerebral but still able to come out as spontaneous, a space that becomes the stage of visual products which are never banal, always intriguing.
Amongst the themes most frequently treated there is the attraction toward an infinite variety of the relations between what is present and what is absent, allusions to what relations become involved starting from what is visible and what is not because covered, masked, evoked beyond the edge of the visual field. This concerns the visual architectures that are offered to the enjoyment of the participant viewer, who is called upon to complete, reconstruct, and interpret suggestions.
There are sophisticated games of shadows and chiaroscuro, contrasts between chiselled patterns and flat surfaces, playful exchanges between planer textures, twisted bodies, like in the magnificent aerial photographs of sails puffed out by the wind and sliding over the surface of the sea made knotty by the currents, and the close shining light.
Her inclination towards the construction of synesthetic effects, is acute. For instance, she manages to bathe us in the desert-like silence of the Middle East by raising the volume of the noise of the flags flapping as they are violently hit by the wind. Or, quite the opposite, she shuts Manhattan up by blocking a translucent cloud in the clear sky, projecting a soft and solitary patch over the lake in Central Park, for our eyes only.
Generally speaking, the most intriguing quality of her work, seems to us the capacity to modulate the intensity of the relations incurring between the things depicted, regardless whether they may be similes between objects of a diverse nature such as elderly women and knotty trees, or rhymes, correspondences, visual or conceptual antagonisms. The constant objective of her work is that of establishing dialogues between objects and concepts that do not appear obvious, but provoke the meditative and interpretive participation of the viewer.
This feature emerges strongly in the wedding pictures, where, next to the typical photographs of the ceremony, the outgoing propensity of the author persuades the guests to take part in individual and group pictures, for which the participants enact mise-en-scénes and poses with the purpose of producing authentic and not banal images. It is a challenge to capture 'in reportage format- the creative interactions between people who find themselves sharing a ceremonial moment. 'A director's touch' and 'drive' towards making individual and collective qualities emerge, without getting trapped in a far too conventional iconography.
Collaborations
She has collaborated with the LTF, Live Tropical Fish and in 2010 she did the photo shoot for the CD cover of 'The Day is Too Short to be Selfish', in the 'Teatro 1763' of Villa Aldrovandi Mazzacorati in Bologna. In 2008 she collaborated and became a member of the non-profit Onlus Handy Superabile, promoting projects throughout the national territory, collaboration with public institutions and private subjects, with the purpose of erasing cultural, institutional and project-related barriers. She has collaborated, since March 2008, with the Canovaccio theatre of Pisa for the photographs of theatrical performances, resulting in a path that will lead her on to various thematic exhibitions.
In 2006 she collaborated on the making of the live DVD 'Materia Viva' (living matter) by Mario Venuti at the Greek Theatre of Taormina, with the photographic reportage of the entire concert.
She has been employed in regatta photography since 2006 and she is the official photographer for the Finn Olympic Class of Italy, she is following the Class throughout the Coppa Italia, the World and Europe Championships. B.A.
She has been covering wedding photo shoots and events in reportage style since 2005.
Exhibitions
Marina employs her passion to bear witness to the difficulties the disabled are subjected to and raise awareness through her work in the community of those who enjoy a healthy lifestyle. Her photographic report on architectural barriers in Pisa has been displayed during a photography exhibition at the University of Pisa, with the purpose of making the institutions aware of the issue. The photographs were also on display in Viareggio in 2009 and Follonica in 2011.
She has taken part in group and solo photography exhibitions in Naples, Pisa, Florence and Rome. In 2006 she was selected, by the National Geographic, for the photography 'Octopus in the sun' which was then published on the internet website of National Geographic Italy, and the National went on to choose her in 2009 for the photograph 'Mirror of nature', also published on the internet website of National Geographic Italy.