There is a frame I have been chasing since 2015. Warm grain, a hint of magenta in the shadows, the kind of color you'd find on a roll of film that's been sitting in a drawer since 1989. The taste comes from the same place as the music I keep on repeat — synthwave, retrowave, anything that belongs to the years between 1985 and 1995. Cinema taught me what the frame looks like; that decade taught me how it should feel. Every portrait I make is, in some quiet way, a try at the same image.

I'm Mario. I'm Italian, from Naples originally, then Milan for three years, then Lisbon since 2024. The move South was less a plan than a correction. I had taken a trip to Miami at the end of 2023, come back to Milan and could not unsee how grey the city suddenly felt. A few months later I was in Portugal. Lisbon's light did the rest.

Photography found me, not the other way around. In 2015 I was in Riga with a friend who had a Sony Alpha. She let me shoot a few frames. Something clicked that I can only describe as recognition, like meeting a language I already spoke. I flew back home, drove straight to a camera store in Naples and walked out with a Nikon D3400. The career started, in retrospect, in the parking lot.

In the decade since, I've worked in Italy and across Europe — portraits, intimate boudoir, motorbike lifestyle, the occasional commercial brief. Clients have flown in from New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Riyadh, Medellin and Miami to sit for sessions; we shoot in Lisbon's historic streets, along the Atlantic coast, inside the elegant interiors this city is generous with.

If I have one specialty within the portrait work, it's the lost-place session. Over the past few years I've built a private archive of abandoned villas, derelict palaces and forgotten interiors across Italy and Europe — places most photographers don't know exist. I keep adding to it. If you want a session that doesn't look like anyone else's, I'll plan the trip, find the location, time the light and shoot you somewhere that feels like a film set that was real once.

I work in five languages: English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian — which makes the producing side of an international shoot disappear into the background, where it should be.

What I'm drawn to, more than any specific subject, is people in places. A street that looks like a still from a film I haven't seen yet. A face caught in the half-second when the performance drops. I don't have a more sophisticated answer than that. I'm drawn to it, I always have been, and the work is the proof.

If we shoot together, expect a conversation first, a plan second, and the kind of patience on set that lets the picture find itself. The grain comes later, in the edit, but the cinema, the nostalgia, the warmth, all of that has been there since Riga.