We recently connected with Alice Esposito and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Alice , thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
I got it from my Mother, I used to go to her office from time to time and she would always help others while still doing her work, always giving 3000% and somehow still being able to answer all my questions about her job, or just my silly question about this and that, I could see how disappointed on herself she would get when things weren’t solved in a timely manners, or at her best abilities, maybe she used to blame herself a bit too much, but I think that’s what leaders do, always listen to others and never blame coworkers if something doesn’t work, but instead trying to find a solution together while learning and build trust in each other.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’m a Queer photographer/Creative Director.
I was born in Rome and lived part of my childhood there, I traveled a lot since my parents were diplomats (England, Switzerland, Sweden, Hungary), I ended up studying Visual Media and Photography at SFSU and completed part of my MFA there (Photography/Visual Art and Curatorial Studies) and part in Milan.
I love working with both digital and analog cameras, I prefer film and developing and printing in the Dark Room, I own medium and large format cameras. Some of my favorites are Rolleiflex, Leica, and Hasselblad. I have worked with some of the most important photographers and artists in Europe such as Vincenzo Castella, my mentor. We collaborated and took part in exhibitions and traveled across Italy. I always carry his wisdom and knowledge with me.
I grew up watching, Italian Neorealism, Nouvelle Vague, and Film Noir; they all influenced my work greatly.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
One thing my mentor always told me was: “Never lose your vision”. Each of us has a unique vision of the world, it’s great to be open about everything around us but it’s important not to change at the core, about the things that make us different, it’s easy to be influenced and changed, especially by social media trends of what specific jobs require from us, I feel like sometimes I lost myself into the repetitiveness of the job and lack of creativity due to following specific requirement and never go outside the line, what kept me apart is my curiosity and interests in new cultures and when I feel like my creativity and vision is going away from me, I try to go to exhibitions, have photo adventure with another photographer, find new passions to recharge my creativity.
If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?
Recently I became hard of hearing, and I had to adapt my way of communicating and understanding other people. Not only did I start to learn sign language but I had to rely more and more on my other senses. In doing so, I started to pay attention more to the expressions and gestures of the people that I was talking to, the little ticks, peculiar traits, and the body language of a person became some of the most important elements of communication for me, more than the spoken language, and I think my photography is being influenced by this, I tend to pay more attention to little things, details, before I was more a composition kind of photographer, not I tend to be more focused of a specific detail and I build the photo around it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.espositoalice.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alice.cooper.esposito/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alice-cooper-esposito/
Image Credits
My portrait was shot by Chia Chen, The names of the models should be under the image, but in case the first 2 Chase Coleman, image n.3 Taylor Murphy-Sinclair, and last 2 Chia Chen, the other (square ones do not need captions) and can be put at the end of the article.
