Manuel Guerzoni came to photography later than many photographers he admires. Cameras fascinated him when he was young, but he had not grown up studying photobooks, exhibitions or the names of canonical photographers. His practice began instead with an old SLR given to him and several years of trial, error and technical play.
At first, making photographs had no larger direction. The camera itself was the problem to solve. Over time, that curiosity moved outward toward people, place and the social tensions he felt photography could make visible.
When the internal dialogue goes quiet
Guerzoni describes himself as someone who spends a great deal of time inside his own head. Carrying a camera interrupts that cycle. Attention moves outward and the internal dialogue quiets down.
Carrying a camera interrupts the internal dialogue. Attention moves outward.
That shift is one of photography’s most personal functions for him. The act of looking becomes therapeutic precisely because it requires concentration on the external world.
Photographing social fractures
Much of Guerzoni’s work focuses on poverty, discrimination and political division in the United States. These are difficult subjects, and he approaches them with the hope that a photograph can create empathy across political lines rather than simply confirm an audience’s existing position.
For him, place is the stage where systemic issues become visible, while the people inside those places carry the lived consequences. The camera becomes a bridge between an individual life and a broader social condition.
Obama and the moment photography changed weight
A major turning point came during Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. Guerzoni photographed the atmosphere surrounding the campaign and saw the work published by The New York Times.
For someone who had started without formal training or a clear idea of photography as art, that experience changed the scale of what the medium seemed capable of doing. Photography was no longer only experimentation. It could enter public discourse and carry political weight.
Digital control rather than analogue identity
Guerzoni works with a Leica M10 and values the control a digital workflow gives him from exposure through publication. His relationship with analogue photography is therefore one of admiration rather than identity.
He follows film photographers closely and often finds their work stronger than much of what he sees digitally, but he would only seriously adopt film if he could control the entire process himself, including development and printing. A private darkroom would make analogue attractive because autonomy is essential to his method.
The distinction is important: slowness and deliberateness do not belong exclusively to film. They can also be choices inside a digital practice.
When the audience takes the photograph away from you
Guerzoni values control, but once a photograph enters the world that control ends. Media outlets have repeatedly selected images he did not expect them to choose. In one particularly strange case, a decorating company found one of his photographs on Instagram and printed it hundreds of times for the rooms of a luxury San Francisco hotel.
He jokes that it is not a photograph he would want in his own bedroom. The experience nevertheless made a serious point: viewers assign their own meanings and uses to an image regardless of the photographer’s intention.
The American South changes the centre
Another turning point came through his wife, whose roots are in the American South. Travelling through Alabama, Louisiana and other places that were initially unfamiliar shifted the emotional centre of Guerzoni’s documentary work.
He is now working in South Louisiana on the consequences of climate change: disappearing wetlands and barrier islands, rising water, subsidence and communities increasingly exposed to storms and flooding. The project is about physical erosion and the possible disappearance of a way of life at the same time.
Precision as respect
Guerzoni wants viewers to understand that his technical precision is not primarily about perfectionism. It is connected to responsibility.
Precision becomes a sign of respect.
When photographing delicate social subjects, every decision in the frame should feel intentional because the people being represented deserve that attention. Precision becomes a sign of respect and a way of giving the image enough clarity to enter a difficult conversation without reducing its subjects to symbols.
Follow Manuel Guerzoni: @manuel_guerzoni on Instagram · manuelguerzoni.com
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind photographic practice.
