CHIARA CEOLIN
PHOTOGRAPHER
PERSONAL DETAILS
Full name:
Chiara Ceolin
Permanent address:
98A Brondesbury road
NW6 6RX London
United Kingdom
Telephone:
+44 (0)756.4027.518
Email:
info@chiaraceolin.com
Personal Website:
www.chiaraceolin.com
Represented by:
Emblema photo-agency www.emblema.net
BIOGRAPHY
After ten years as clinical psychologist I decided that I needed to share some silent stories
rather than just listen to them. I embraced my camera, started assisting a photojournalist and
attended a course in Photojournalism at International Centre of Photography FORMA in Milan.
My first project was about the horrible condition of refugees in Italy, in Turin in particular.
APPRODI (LANDED) became then a collaborative project with the cultural association AZUL.
It has been funded by Regione Piemonte in order to organize an exhibition and to produce a
multimedia piece. The exhibition has been hosted by the Museo della Resistenza, della
Deportazione, della Guerra, dei Diritti e della Libertà in Turin in May 2011.
I moved to London to attend the master in Photojournalism at the University of Westminster in
2009; after that I decided to build my career in London and to live there.
Being mainly interested in social issues, I explored the condition of the over 350,000 children
left behind in Romania. My work A MISSING GENERATION was very much appreciated by the
photo-agency EMBLEMA to the point that they decided to represent me. It has been
shortlisted in many awards in 2012 (see details).
My work has been published mainly on Italian magazines.
WWW.CHIARACEOLIN.COM
PHOTOGRAPHER
PUBLICATIONS AND AWARDS
Newspapers and Magazine:
COSMOPOLITAN Italia, SETTE of Il Corriere della Sera, The London Evening Standard, Il
Corriere della Sera, IL VENERDI of Repubblica.
(tearsheets visible on my website)
Books:
BROAD VISION - The Art & Science of Looking published by the UNIVERSITY OF
WESTMINSTER (November 2011) my role has been both as photographer and as designer.
(Available on Amazon and on my website)
Awards:
Shortlisted at London Festival of Photography 2012, A Missing Generation
Shortlisted at Kuala Lampur International Photo Award 2012, A Missing Generation
Shortlisted at Noorderlicht FotoFestival 2012, A Missing Generation
PREMIO INTERNAZIONALE DI FOTOGIORNALISMO MULTIMEDIALE 2011 by Meeting degli
Indipendenti and Fotografia e Informazione for the multimedia work APPRODI
(www.meiweb.it and visible on my website)
CLIENTS
MAGIC ME
FORWARD UK;
EQUALITY NOW;
KAYD;
REDSEA-ONLINE;
UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER;
BRENT MAGAZINE;
My experience as psychologist and educator is of great help in my new career; listening,
moreover, remains one of my stronger skills and an essential instrument of work.
My aim is to keep working on social issues starting new project with NGOs.
PERSONAL STATEMENT
A rural agricultural world is disappearing in Romania. Poverty and
unemployment have forced around 5 million people to go away from
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PHOTOGRAPHER
the country leaving behind only young and elderly people. According
to UNICEF, over 350 thousand children live in Romania without one or
both of their parents. It was their story that I was interested in.
My work is focused on Vladut, a teenager whose mother left him with
his grandparents when he was eight. She went to Italy and is still there
working as an elderly carer. Vladut lives in Bodesti, a small village in
the poorest region of Romania, Moldava. One fourth of the population
left the village to move abroad in the richer part of Europe or in the
USA in the last fifteen years. Almost one million Romanians moved to
Italy where, in fact, they are the largest migrant community.
Teenagers seem to enjoy the present and the nature around them, as
much as they can without thinking of the past or future, both equally
scary. They can dream, though, or get lost in their nostalgia. Nature is
beautiful there, wild and untouched but both the landscape and the
people are wounded and permeate with a wistful melancholy. Vladut
dreams of living in Bodesti for the rest of his life but he knows that he
will have to abandon his much loved countryside in order to make a
decent living.
The deep relationship between people and their own land has a strong
role in my work. I wanted to highlight the feeling of tragedy that rises
from the contrast between the beauty of the landscape and the
sadness of the reality. At the same time, I wanted to call attention to
the contrast between the hidden life of many Romanians who live in
Western Europe and the public image they have in the media, in
particular in Italy. They are often depicted, in fact, as dangerous and
unpleasant. The missing generation grew without a voice; they didn’t
have freedom of speech during the regime. They now have freedom to
travel and migrate but poverty hasn’t changed. Not even being part of
the European Union made a difference for them.
The elderly in Bodesti share a similar feeling with the young. They miss
their sons and daughters, but their relation with the environment is
different: nature is no longer a place to enjoy. It only means hard work
- harder than in the past because their bodies are weaker. The missing
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generation is missed a lot but it is not lost through war or sickness;
rather it is a generation that has disappeared due to the state of a
country crippled by unemployment.
The issue is an ongoing reality based on the absence of a generation.
Nothing really happens in it, there are no events that can even slightly
be considered news or during which a change or a transformation is
happening. According to Clive Scott documentary photography helps
us to understand a way of life more than a single event, it “polarizes
and straddles studium and punctum, the culturally informative and the
personally lacerating” driving the reader to reflect on humanity in
general without the need of temporality. Anyway I wanted to preserve
a journalistic side of the story and I think that the connections with the
actual political, economical and social conditions are as relevant as the
way of life in Bodesti. This journalistic soul of the work is not evident
in the images, it needs the text to be explained: the captions, in fact,
make it evident.
My work is a tribute to the many women and men that are forced to
live far from their children, the toughest choice for parents and for
children too.
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