Luca Piffaretti Photography

07/01/2025

Ecuador pt2 with , by far the most memorable experience of this past year. Here are some images from the Andes:

1. Morning light through the pine trees near the Quilotoa Lake
2. Members of the Shalala community prepare for a community meeting in Macapaungo
3. Humberto, standing in front of Monte Juyende, the highest peak of the Quilotoa Volcano
4. A hydroelectric power station near Baños. As of December, most of the artificial lakes used to produce electricity stood at a very low level due to the worst drought in the past century. The country had to endure daily power cuts lasting up to twelve hours for more than four months.
5. A meteorological station at around 5000m of altitude on the Cotopaxi Volcano. The volcano glacier retreated several hundreds meters due to the ongoing drought.
6. The lunar landscape of the Cotopaxi volcano.

03/01/2025

Ecuador pt2 with , by far the most memorable experience of this past year. Here are some images from Quito:

1. Rooftops seen from the Centro de Arte Contemporanea de Quito
2. A hairdresser in the historic centre
3. Sor Ruth and Sor Enma in their Salesian school
4. The historic centre of Quito seen from La Tola
5. Riot Police at a protest against the Noboa government near La Alameda
6. Office building and electric cables in La Carolina

02/01/2025

Ecuador pt2 with , by far the most memorable experience of this past year. Here are some images from the Amazon Forest:

1. A Monkey among the trees at the Kawana Lagoon, Puerto Misahuallí
2. A farmer’s market stall in Puyo
3. The harbour on the Napo River in Coca
4. Pancho, our incredibly knowledgeable guide during our stay at
5. Gas flares, a polluting collateral of oil extraction, near Shushufindi
6. Cacao at farm, near Loreto

30/09/2024

04/09/2024

Seriously considering a career as a cow photographer.

Apart from that, here is a short series of images from paradise, which for me is somewhere around .campotencia (you can see a glimpse of the hut on picture 4), where I found the peace of the mountains and the warm company of my friends who manage the hut. The summer season is almost over, but if you find yourselves around the Alps this month or next summer make sure you hike to this wonderful place.

13/08/2024

The day Aisha dressed like the cliffs. Charleston and Seven Sisters Cliffs.

25/07/2024

Presented as part of ‘Where the Flow Ends’ by .collective, ‘Carcheology’ imagines a fictional world without cars but where roads, bridges, garages, and service stations are still dominating the landscape. It does so by exploring the area of the Severn Estuary between the Severn Bridge and the Prince of Whales Bridge, like an archaeologist in search of traces from the past.

See the full series on my website (link in bio)

04/07/2024

‘Where the Flow Ends’ by .collective closed last Sunday, and I just now had the time to reflect on the experience.

Curating and putting up an exhibition is always a rollercoaster of emotions, from the initial excitement when ideas start to take form, to anxiety when you realise how little time you have to get everything done, and finally relief when you realise you crossed the finishing line and everything is ready (we were 10 min late this time to be precise).

Every time, when you look at your work on the wall you ask yourself, ‘Was it worth it?’ In a way, considering my relationship with photography as a tool of self-reflection and therapy, I am usually quite happy just to be around to photograph and explore. I have hard-drives with thousands of images that no one will ever see. Nevertheless, they were all worth taking.

So, is it worth the effort? How do you evaluate the success of an exhibition? During the length of the show, we had 75 postcards with images from the project on a table, and visitors were invited to write anything (a feeling, a memory) about their favorite photos. Reading those comments made me realise that yes, it is definitively worth showing your work, because even if it speaks in a completely different way than intended to another person, it still creates a connection between humans, places and feelings … and there lies the power of it.

If you got this far, here are some comments I found behind the images in this post:

1. ‘Going in to the abyss. The unknown isn’t that scary’ | Nostalgia. I was driven across this bridge weekly as a child’

2. ‘There is beauty in ugly and ugly in beauty’

3. ‘Confinement. Human interference. Suffocation + obstruction on nature. Human busyness but longing for rest + space’

4. ‘Burial, Layers, Depth, Discarded’

5. ‘I’d like to think there is a way out and we cans still reverse our mistakes’

11/06/2024

My contribution to this weekend Hackney Urban Survey workshop with .collective around Hackney Wick and the Olympic Park. As always it’s a tryptic, and as always I will print and show just one photo. I won’t tell you which one, come to the pop-up exhibition on Thursday to know the answer and to check out some incredible work by the participants and a special contribution by . RSVP through the link in my story.

This time my exploration focused on the boundaries that form the outer perimeter of the area and the internal boundaries which often limit the access to many areas that should be public but are often off limits and highly guarded.

29/05/2024

A lot of the landscapes that I explored during the week I spent on the shores of the Severn estuary with .collective look like this: kind of bucolic, but always interrupted by the bulky intervention of man made structures.

I chose to focus on the area between the two bridges. One, opened in 1966, connects Aust with Chepstow, while the newer one (pictured in the background and opened in 1996) crosses the estuary a few kilometres to the south. In this buffer zone, I tried to imagine an utopic world without cars, and what would be the impact of all the infrastructure that we would leave behind in a car-free environment.

This and other images, form part of “Where the Flow Ends”, a collective photographic project that sets out to build a renewed narrative of the river Severn, and poses the question of how we will choose our future relationship with the river.

Join us on the evening of the 20th of June at our studio on 215 Mare street for the exhibition opening.

RSVP LINK IN BIO

Graphic by

13/05/2024

Stills from the Jesi cemetery, designed by Italian architect Leonardo Ricci and built between 1984 and 1994. It’s hard to describe how incredibly complex is the architecture of this place, which offers at the same time space to get lost and to find peace behind the many hidden corners that house the tombstones.

26/04/2024

Another fun workshop about green spaces in Hackney yesterday with .collective. Huge thanks to for her amazing contribution!

Here is my triptych from the day. As always, I set a goal, which was to photograph Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, and then got lost along the way. I did end up taking a few photos of the cemetery, but was mostly interested in the anarchic resilience of random bits of green reclaiming pieces of sidewalks, overwhelming fences and breaking up walls.

The other participants did, as always, an impressive job. If you want to see their work come this evening to 215 Mare street for the exhibition opening from 6.30pm.