Andrea
Cimatti

Andrea Cimatti (1964) became irremediably passionate about the universe when he was a child. He graduated in Astronomy at University of Bologna and obtained the PhD at the University of Florence. After doing research in Germany and the US, he worked in Italy at the National Institute for Astrophysics. Now, he is full professor at the University of Bologna. His main research field is observational cosmology.

Since he was a kid, Andrea has been also totally fascinated by the artistic side of photography, but with a solid scientific and technical background. He is old enough to have experienced analogic photography and the darkroom processes for medium and 35 mm formats. After this phase, he gradually moved to digital photography, but with a “purist” approach against an excessive manipulation of images with software tools. His conviction is that photography is not digital art or computer graphics. Photographs must be pure and authentic without any artificial postprocessing to make them fascinating. As a matter of fact, photography is the art of capturing light to “paint” what the eyes see and the mind feels. Without tricks.

His preferred subjects are landscapes (natural and urban) under special circumstances which generate strong emotions and deep reflections. Human subjects and figures are sometimes present, but they never dominate the scene and are there only to guide your mind and imagination. The key element is light, especially during the very short moments between sunset and darkness when everything changes rapidly until it disappears stimulating deep reflections, hopes, dreams and fears. During his artistic career, he presented his artwork in exhibitions, and his main achievement was to win the 7th Edition of the international Celeste Prize in 2015 with a photograph entitled Illuminated Love (with no manipulation, of course). In his little free time, he loves windsurfing and listening to jazz.