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award-winning
iconic imagery
Get to know some of my most popular works and the stories behind them. All these images have received international recognition through awards, publications, and exhibitions.
 
We’ve all seen a flamingo, but have you ever seen a flamingone?  Only an AI could make that up. Or did I just make that up? 
 
Get to know the unlikely creature that is turning heads all over the world, and the story of how nature beat the machine. After winning the people's choice and a jury award in the AI category of a prestigious photography competition, F L A M I N G O N E sparked a global public debate when I revealed that it is a real photo. The idea was to show the continued relevance of a human touch in translating the real world into creatively and emotionally relevant languages, and to magnify the blurred line between photography and AI-imagery. While the fact that F L A M I N G O N E could fool a jury of industry experts—including members of the New York Times, Phaidon Press, Getty Images, Centre Pompidou, and Christie’s—speaks to the dangers of fake imagery, the people’s choice award seems like a message of hope: the only real picture in the AI category resonated more with the public than any of the AI-images it competed against. Apparently, we remain connected to the natural world as long as our feelings are still rooted there. With AI-generated content remodeling the digital landscape rapidly while sparking an ever-fiercer debate about its implications for the future of content, its creators, and its consumers, F L A M I N G O N E proved that human-made content has not lost its relevance, that Mother Nature and her human interpreters can still beat the machine, and that creativity and emotion are more than just a string of digits. F L A M I N G O N E has been featured in hundreds of publications, exhibitions, TV shows, books, academic papers, school and university curriculums, art collections, and more, seen by millions all over the world.


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F L A M I N G O N E' s cousin
 
S E L F I E N D
 
The day I shot F L A M I N G O N E, I'd set out at 5am to beat the crowds to a Caribbean beach with free-roaming flamingos. And while my alone-moment with F L A M I N G O N E became one for the (art-history) books, I also got a great shot with a selfie human later that day. S E L F I E N D has received honors from 35 Awards (street photography) and KAAF (black and white), and has been featured in various exhibitions as well as publications such as FLAASH Magazine and Digital Photographer. 
 



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an ode to youth and love and stuff
 
SILLY LOVE
 





In 2023, my photo HOLI FACE ended up among the winners of the CEWE Award, the world’s largest photo contest. In the runup to 2024’s award, CEWE reached out to me because another entry of mine, SILLY LOVE, had caught their eye. The humbling offer: to be the representative of their new Young Talent Award! Check out my tips for aspiring photographers, featured on the contest's website here.
SILLY LOVE is a candid scene I happened upon when roaming Venice's colorful Burano island. A nearby bridge offered a slightly elevated vantage point to capture the scene from an angle that decreased the proximity to the subjects to not invade or interrupt their publicly intimate interaction. 
SILLY LOVE has received distinctions from Great Photo Awards and Urban Photo Awards, has been featured in the Mythography V volume—a photography book published by Exhibit Around—,and appeared in various solo and group shows, among which an exhibition at Trieste Airport.

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one of those moments
 
swing state
 
In 2018, National Geographic editors selected my photo as a finalist for a Nat Geo Traveler cover. It was a great honor to see my work stand out from over 20,000 submissions. 
 
The picture shows my friend Becca swinging in front of Ecuador's active Tungurahua volcano. Nowadays, the swing is equipped with a harness and other safety measure, but back in 2012 when I took that shot, it was truly a swing for the daring, who would stare at an unforgiving abyss below.
The image is featured in my 2024 limited collection I'm 12 now.
 

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home is where the home is
ALL WAS FEEL
 
I stumbled into this fairytale at just the right time, with the late autumn sun setting on this half-timbered, half-fairydust home in Normandy. I’d taken a few pictures from afar to put the house in the context of its surroundings just to find that its essence could only be captured from up close, detached from space and time. It was all feel, and it didn’t feel real. ALL WAS FEEL has been featured by Smithsonian Magazine in 2024.
 



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656.738 competitors
OSTRETCH
 
No less awkward than F L A M I N G O N E, and just as unlikely a hero, O S T R E T C H emerged victoriously as a finalist among 656.738 competitors at the CEWE Photo Award 2025—the world’s largest photography competition. Another lucky shot of a bird cleaning its plumage amusingly, I snapped this candid candy from a car window, while driving through a South African National Park.
 


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beating the sun to the summit
 
coexistence contrast
 
Standing tall at 1,000 feet, Big Daddy is a massive dune in the Namib desert. The only way to conquer it without dying a thousand deaths (one per foot) is to get a 4 am head start and beat the sun to the summit. It was worth every step though, seeing my picture recognized alongside some of the world’s finest landscape photography as a finalist at the Nature Conservancy photo competition in 2023.
 


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an iconic dreamscape
 
AUTUMN IN SPRING
 
I don’t know whether it was bad luck that Patagonia’s iconic Mt. Fitzroy was shrouded in a thick cloud cover for most of that hike, or whether it was fantastic luck to stumble upon that blue window, but certainly the timing couldn’t have been better. AUTUMN IN SPRING has been selected as a finalist at the Great Photo Awards 2024, and has been featured in various exhibitions.
 


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from another world, before ours
 
iron age stone
 
It’s hard to tell where a non-fictional plot starts and ends, but I want to say that this one started with a perplexed elephant in Botswana, continued with jumping out of a burning car in the Namib desert, and ended with a waterfall wedding in Zimbabwe, and everything that happened before and after was a different story. As part of the wedding celebrations, we visited the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, an ancient city of an ancient kingdom where ancient architecture was in future-ready symbiosis with nature. My shot “iron age stone” has been featured in the Archaeological Institute of America's calendar as a contest winner. It was also a finalist at the 2024 SUGI x NAVA photography award, which is a great honor given how much I admire SUGi’s mission of greening cities and NAVA’s vision of making art more accessible.
 



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lucky shot
a shot 4,500 years in the making
 
There are many fantastic vantage points to capture the pyramids, but to have a little boy walk into your frame and throw a rock at these marvels of civilization, is something that only happens once every 4,500 years. After walking around the Giza plateau all day, I was lucky to be at the intersection of right place and right time to capture this candid shot from a little-visited lookout point far out. It also offered a telling view that put the proximity of these ancient monuments and today’s urban sprawl into tangible perspective. This lucky and literal shot has been awarded as a winner by the Archaeological Institute of America and was featured in the institute’s calendar and various exhibitions around the world.
 


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action activism
human meteor
Fighting domestic violence in public, Bolivian Aymara women started Cholitas wrestling as a form of activism presented as entertainment. Fighting back both literally and symbolically, much of the theatrical performance happens mid-air. Getting up close to the ring gets you close to the action—and I snapped this shot just before I was told to evacuate. Human meteor  is part of Global 50/50’s This Is Gender collection, and has been featured in collaboration with the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) at the Expo 2025 in Japan.
 




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the cyclic nature of nature
DEATH
BIRTHING
LIFE
Life and death are the central themes of our existence, and what you make of them is what you believe. But whether you believe in beliefs or in science, death is a transformation, not an end. I stumbled upon this tiny green reminder during a stroll among the dead at La Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires. Springing from a cross-shaped opening in a white marble tomb, behind which the proprietor perished, it had started over the cycle of life once more. DEATH BIRTHING LIFE is featured in Exhibit Around's book "Canticle of the Creatures" and has partaken in various solo and group shows.
 


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one of a kind times four
 
SUPERSYMMETRY
 
Embodying its institutional function through a mimetic architectural design, the Francois-Mitterrand Library in Paris is one of a kind times four: its main feature are four identical buildings shaped like open books with two sides (pages) at a 90-degree angle. The modern exterior simultaneously mirrors and juxtaposes the interior not only objectively but also conceptually, spanning a bridge from the historic past it contains and maintains towards the collective knowledge of future generations. Getting up close enough to the buildings to “read” them, an apparently infinite symmetry emerges that feels symbolic of literature's continuous relevance and the unending trajectory of our accumulative knowledge contained in writing. One of the perks of a nomadic life and settling in places rather than passing through: you get to know those lesser known landmarks that you can only find, not seek. SUPERSYMMETRY has been displayed and published through and exhibition and catalogue by Tati Space Photography Center.
 









































