Bio | giuseppepotente.com

Bio, Recent Awards and Exhibitions

Bio

Writing a biography is difficult. I decided instead to tell the stories that shaped the way I observe the world.

I remember clearly how my fascination with visual art began. As a boy, I spent much of my time reading—science, literature, anything I could find. Kept at home by my parents, books became my closest companions. At the age of ten, I was deeply struck by Giambattista Vico's theory of historical cycles, an idea that has continued to influence the way I think ever since.

A few years later, somehow, an English book of black-and-white photographs found its way into our home. One image has never left me: the portrait of a young woman illuminated by light filtering through a window. Years later I learned that it was a photographic classic. At the time, I had no idea that visual art—whether through photography or any other medium—would become the enduring passion of my life, surviving circumstances that caused many of my other passions to fade.

During adolescence, I often found comfort in contemplating the night sky. At that time I was reading Kant, and one sentence became engraved in my memory: "

The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

I still feel the force of those words whenever I work toward creating what I call inevitable images.

A further turning point came when I had to choose between literature and science. Reading The Citadel by A. J. Cronin convinced me that there was room for humanity and art within biomedical studies, and I chose Medicine in order to understand the mechanisms underlying the origin of life.

The seed of my visual research, planted during adolescence, was unexpectedly awakened in a radiographic darkroom, where X-ray films were still developed by hand. Watching an image slowly emerge from the developing chemicals—with their strong and far from pleasant smell—was an unforgettable experience. Perhaps I avoided fainting thanks to the developer itself. From that moment on, I have never stopped creating images, first in my mind and then through photography.

As a young university assistant, I was assigned to a women's oncology department. Encountering human suffering at such close range profoundly deepened my sense of empathy. Even within the calm and disciplined decision-making required by medicine, that experience left a lasting mark on what would later become my humanistic photographic research.

Throughout my life I have also felt a constant need to escape the city. For many years that meant spending time in the hills where northern Lazio, Umbria and southern Tuscany meet. My self-portrait in the Contact page, with a woodland behind me, was taken there and reflects a journey that, in many ways, still continues.

For many years the scientific dimension of the images I created prevailed over the artistic one, which returned to the foreground at the beginning of the new millennium.

Some of you may wonder whether I believe I am a different person from the boy who spent his days reading and quietly looking at photographs in his room.

I am not.

I continue to explore the world with the same curiosity, following two paths that have never stopped informing one another: science and art.

Recent Awards

Terroirs - Critic's Choice, Lensculture Awards 2021

Ice & Ikebanas - Finalist, IPA , 2022

Terroirs -Refocus B&W Awards 2022.

Diving African Masks - TIFA 2025

Neural Nets -TIFA 2025

Photobooks

Islanders (2025)

https://www.blurb.com/b/12461033-islanders

Travelers (2021)