Infrared Photography Artist Feature: Paolo Pettigiani

My hometown of Avigliana, Italy, is where I experimented with my first infrared images on Avigliana’s lake. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Design and Visual Communication from the Polytechnic University of Turin and received a master’s in Photography at IED. I now live in Torino, and I’m the co-founder and art director of No Panic – a creative agency focused on strategic brand narrative. I spent my childhood walking, hiking, and climbing with friends and my parents in the Alps of northern Italy. Every weekend, I still escape from the city to the mountains. I am also a snowboard instructor in the winter.

Nature, Architecture, and Visual Inspiration

I find inspiration from nature, architecture, graphic design, film, and everything new I encounter in my daily life. I think every kind of suggestion can be useful to improve my creative ideas. I also find inspiration for my projects on digital platforms like Behance and Instagram. Still, I love to read magazines and art books to find different tips, information, and visual styles.

The beauty of photography is that it’s an extension of the human eye, allowing you to see what’s beyond your sight, even the invisible. This is especially true of infrared photography, which captures wavelengths of light invisible to the naked eye and shows you an otherwise inaccessible world.

I started taking photos for fun during a family trip to Argentina. I was ten years old, and I used an old analog camera. Photography became a passion and later, during university, started to become a job as well.

Combining Photography and Graphic Design

During my undergraduate studies, I felt the need to combine photography and graphic design into a visually unique image. This allowed me to express my vision of the world with a specific focus on colors, shapes, and nature in an aesthetically pleasing image. I really think that colors represent my academic soul, and nature represents my love for outdoor sports and nature. 

Initially, this duplicity led me to focus a lot on shapes and colors, creating minimalist architectural projects.

Finding a Trademark Style Through Infrared

Eventually, I started to explore the topic of seeing the unseen, driven by a desire to explore familiar places, expanding the limits of perception through a graphic and visual exploration of the territory. I found my trademark style using infrared photography: a fusion of science and creativity that captures the electromagnetic radiation of light whose wavelengths are not visible to the human eye.

Infraland is an ongoing project that transforms ordinary places into surreal landscapes unbound by human perception, renewing the spectators’ idea of the world in order to question reality as we see it. An invitation to further explore knowledge and human relationships with new enthusiasm and new eyes.