Recent Work
About the Artist
Mark de Paola’s earliest memory is sitting on the floor of his father’s photographic studios in Los Angeles and New York, watching photoshoots and immersing himself in the fashion books and periodicals of the time. Mark’s visual foundation is anchored in the works of his father Alessio de Paola, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Bert Stern and Art Kane.
Alessio de Paola did not hesitate to put his son Mark behind a camera, teaching him the basics with an 8×10 view camera. Eventually, Mark had earned his way toward the more portable and streamlined Leica M3 with which he photographed young hippies at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park during weekends.
Mark received his first assignment in his twenties: a magazine cover shoot of actor Henry Fonda. His career then took off with countless campaign shoots, editorials and covers for various publications, including Vogue Mexico and Vogue Spain. Eventually his storytelling translated to motion and television work and he went on to direct and shoot several hundred spots for Anheuser-Busch, Ducati, Donna Karan, Giorgio Perfume (exhibited in MoMA New York), Gucci, Ford, and Sony among many others.
Mark is a frequent lecturer at many educational institutions and venues including a recent talk with Alessia Glaviano, Senior Photo Editor at Vogue Italia, and masterclasses with the New York Film Academy and the Leica Akademie worldwide.
Produced over several years, Recent Work includes portraits, nudes, landscapes, and inanimate objects with recollections of de Paola’s memories, feelings and impressions of the people, and places he has known. The series invites viewers to leave behind the everyday and journey with him, provoking us to project meanings into its viscerally striking, blurred and saturated forms. De Paola’s desire to wield the lens as an extension of his own body is clear in the subtle way he escorts us through his cinematic world. Recent Work is endlessly fascinating and promises to reward those who visit and revisit it again and again.
Mark de Paola’s photography is best described as a combination of reportage, fashion, and beauty. It has always been Mark’s objective to capture natural beauty in a setting where a subject’s personality is allowed to flourish while a story is being told. Intimacy, form, mystery, drama, movement and focus come to mind when viewing his latest work, a departure from the stylized photography that saturates the fashion world today. His command of cameras and fascination with optics allows him to render a fuller, more human vision.
