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Alessandra Meniconzi: The Silk Road

Image Copyright © Alessandra Meniconzi - All Rights Reserved
A trip to India at the age of 21 sparked Swiss photographer Alessandra Meniconzi's 10-year exploration of the peoples of the ancient trade routes. She made several trips to Asia over a 10-year period to document the people and cultures of the "Silk Road", the 2,000-year-old trade route linking the Orient and the Occident.

On the newly updated Canon Europe website (link at bottom of post), Alessandra Meniconzi describes her journey from traveller to photographer, and her travels on the Silk Road, which began in the mid Nineties, and were made in more than one journey.

Her interview is illuminating for many reasons. She still uses a film Canon EOS 1N, and plans to switch to digital soon...and in that context, here's what she says about her photographic style:

"Each of my images is very considered so I find it strange when I see people shooting with a digital camera like a machine gun, only stopping to see if any images are any good and then deleting most of them. New technologies are important but the photographer has to manage them and not be mastered by them. If your eyes and brain become too lazy to think before you shoot I believe your photography will suffer. The camera is not the issue; the issue is who is doing the clicking."

Allessandra's keen eye and sense of composition are in evidence in her gallery of photographs. One of my favorite, apart from this portrait of a Miao woman, is the one of a Pakistani man asleep on a rope bed in a room...while his son(?) stands outside the door, about to enter.

Her Canon gallery is here.

Here is the updated Canon Professional Network. It has videos of the new Canon Mark III.