Chiara Zonca: Documenting Fleeting Moments of Unfamiliarity

Artistic Background

     Chiara Zonca was born in Milan, Italy in 1982. This 33-year-old travel and landscape photographer is currently based in Western Canada. Chiara studied photography during her teenage years but lost her passion for the profession; it was only a decade later that her adoration of still pixels was re-ignited. During this time she had been successfully pursuing a career as a motion graphic designer and video editor.

Chiara Zonca Finds Space: The Final Frontier

Zonca admits that she has always had a desire to explore and find remote, isolated spaces. Her exploration and uncanny ability to find the perfect landscape in a specific moment, just when the weather conditions and changing light alters the perception of its surrounding landscape is pure genius. Perhaps her social media name, Shadow on the run, is more fitting of her alien-like presentation of Earth’s most desolate landscapes. Her profound love and obsession with the unabandoned freedom of space these barren landscapes offer are what drives Chiara to continue pushing on and finding that next perfect alien moment, and all this born from a simple desire to document her new travels.

The Photographer Inspires Others Through Perfectly Blurred Lines

The ability of the talented Zonca to blur the timeline and see beyond the present and probe the earth as an untouched, timeless, ethereal-like entity inspires us to see our planet as an unknown realm. She admits that color is a major factor in her creative process and essentially the tool she uses to transmit her emotions. Chiara’s main focus of her work may be to document fleeting moments of unfamiliarity, which she achieves with awe-inspiring perfection, but when one looks at her images the dream-like, other-worldly effects transport us to another universe. Chiara’s photographs invite us to see our surroundings from a new perspective and to appreciate the planet we have. Her creative process is quite intricate involving a lot of research and following her own intuition; mood boards and hours of solitude in her selected locations. Perhaps she best describes this process:

Dreams take information from real life events and experiences but the information gets re-wired into a new narrative.

A new narrative may just be on the cards for the near future as Zonca is set to embark on an experimental series of self-portraits. She is planning to document her own personal interaction with these remote places on earth and present them in a series, but she does admit that they are simply a new frontier for her to explore.