Photograph > Sonja Arz
I was born in Northampton, UK in 1975, and have lived in Berlin since 2018.
I have followed a life path that has taken me on a difficult and controversial journey, from my childhood interests in astronomy, art, animals and computers, into both a degree and diploma in architecture (which I loved) followed by a short-lived and unfulfilling career in that. I found more success in product, commercial and interior design - touching upon proofreading and English tuition along the way - but with photography as a long term interest, with me since my school days.
I can look back and find in my own early photographs glimpses of a style and quality of image that would really come to interest me - in fact right back to school trips in the 1980s. Through black and white film years in art college and university darkrooms, it was not until purchasing my first digital SLR (a Nikon D5100) in 2012, that I was able to begin to identify with any authority what I liked about photography. It took perhaps even longer to then decided to ignore the impulse to just photograph everything I saw.
The law of averages gave me some lucky strikes during my early digital years and some of those images can be found amongst the collections on these pages. For me they stand out clearly as isolated instances but one or two of them are amongst what I consider my very favourite work.
Since around 2015 or 2016, when I began to have some work printed in photography magazines, I noticed that I seemed to want to work against the popular notions that photographs should be either impressive or commercial (although I had tried to be both those things). Although photography as an art form had previously not interested me excessively, I was nevertheless drawn to the purity of the quickly-captured image as a means of expression. The images that continue to interest me long after pressing the shutter button were, and are, rare but worthy goals.
This website is at least an attempt to document some of the above.
Piero Serra 2021 (to contact me, click my name at the bottom of the page)