Costanza Parigi grew up with analogue photography already present in family life. Her parents used an Olympus camera—the same camera she now owns—and some of her earliest memories involve being asked to pose with her younger sister in places the family wanted to remember.
By primary school she was already making her own photographs with analogue point-and-shoot cameras, filling rolls on school trips, at summer camps and at home. Her orange cat and her sister were recurring subjects long before photography became part of her professional identity.
Colour as interpretation
Today Parigi is drawn to streets, markets, urban landscapes and the small details that interrupt everyday movement. Colour is central to the way she photographs, but not because she treats it as something fixed or objective.
For her, every photographed colour is already an interpretation. Film makes that visible: different stocks, different light and different chemical processes shift the same world into different versions of itself.
Living in Berlin has sharpened that awareness. During the darker parts of the year, the lack of light pushes her to actively search for colour. Rather than making the city feel visually empty, the absence becomes a reason to look more carefully for moments where colour survives.
Waiting long enough to forget
Parigi rarely remembers everything she has photographed by the time a roll is developed. Unless the image was a deliberate portrait or made in a completely unfamiliar place, much of the roll recedes from memory.
That gap is part of the attraction. When the photographs return, she is not simply checking whether the exposure worked. She is encountering the moment again from a different distance.
The image becomes a trigger that allows the event to be relived rather than merely documented.
Letting the result arrive afterwards
Even after years of experimenting with different colour films, Parigi still prefers not to predict every result. Experience has taught her which materials she likes, but surprise remains an important part of the process.
Analogue photography keeps part of the image outside immediate control. That uncertainty allows the final photograph to become something slightly different from the plan that produced it.
Double exposures and imaginary worlds
Some of Parigi’s most satisfying images came from deliberately pushing that uncertainty further through double exposure. Those experiments developed into a series that she later used for Dreamscapes Unbound, a fanzine produced through her independent publishing project Chubby Bambino.
The work reflects a broader direction in her practice: photography as a way of producing worlds rather than simply recording them. Experimentation becomes a method for allowing reality, memory and imagination to overlap inside the same frame.
Brasil — Inner Cities Portraits
Parigi’s project Brasil — Inner Cities Portraits was made between 2024 and 2025 in northern Brazil, especially in Belém and Manaus. The series looks at urban life in the Amazonian capitals through markets, streets and the movement of people through historic city centres.
The project sits naturally beside her work as a visual anthropologist, filmmaker and researcher. Parigi’s broader practice combines fieldwork, humanistic research, film production and interdisciplinary collaboration, with particular attention to communities and the transmission of cultural knowledge.
The camera therefore becomes both an artistic instrument and a way of paying attention to how people inhabit a place.
Photography between anthropology and imagination
Parigi’s work does not separate observation from interpretation. Her interest in ethnography makes her attentive to social space and everyday behaviour, while her interest in colour, double exposure and experimental processes keeps the image from pretending to be neutral.
That tension is useful. A photograph can observe the world and still acknowledge that every frame is shaped by the person making it.
What comes next
Parigi wants to continue making projects that create new imaginary worlds while also moving toward more intimate portraiture. She sees analogue photography not only as an artistic technique but as a way of exploring the many ways people live, present themselves and understand the world around them.
The next work may therefore move in two directions at once: deeper into experimentation, and closer to people.
Questions about Costanza’s colour film photography
What does colour mean in her photographs?
Costanza sees reproduced colour as an interpretation. Living in Berlin has encouraged her to seek out colours and work with the changing light around her.
Where was Brasil — Inner Cities Portraits made?
The series was made in Brazil between 2024 and 2025, mainly in Belém and Manaus. It follows everyday activity in markets and historic city centres.
How does she use double exposures?
She deliberately experiments with double exposure to create imaginary worlds. Some of these photographs became part of her fanzine Dreamscapes Unbound, produced through Chubby Bambino.
Explore more conversations about photography, memory and creative choices in Developing Stories.
Follow Costanza Parigi: @costanza_parigi · costanzaparigi.com
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the photographs we encounter.
