Steve Giovinco Longer Career Narrative

Psychologically intimate photographs of couples and mysterious night landscapes are my two major bodies of work. They both combine documentary and narrative photographic traditions, the approach is personal and intuitive. For the past twenty-five years I have been an active professional artist in New York, participating in over eighty local and international exhibitions.

My interest in photography stems directly from my early years where I would watch movies my father would bring home during my childhood and play in our darkened basement. During high school I was drawn to European literature and film, which would become continual sources of inspiration.

In 2015, I attended artist residency fellowships at The Ucross Foundation Residency and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, where the night landscape series became more emotive and included subtle references to artificial light. I also worked on a photo-related social media project documenting my father’s death. Exploring memory and impermanence, these photographs are a vivid portrait of  human relations, and trace my personal experience of death, loss and grieving. It was released on the smartphone app Snapchat, where each day an image was posted that was viewed for only twenty-four hours before it disappears.

In 2016, capturing climate change at night became a main focus. The American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship and Lois Roth Endowment funded a month-long seminal trip to photograph climate change in Greenland, which solidified my focus on nightlandscapes and the environment. I also won the Puffin Foundation Award, and was a Big Bend National Park Artist in Residence and Marion Fellowship for the Visual and Performing Arts Finalist.

In 2017, I was able to expand my interest in climate change by photographing in the French Pyrenees as the result of being an artist-in-resident at the Château de l’Esparrou, funded by Odyssee Fellowship and the French Government. This resulted in a one-person exhibition at Canet-en-Roussillon, France.

Additional exhibitions of some Greenland photos included Fast Forward // Rewind, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA), Atlanta, and Atlanta Celebrates Photography, Atlanta. I gave a lecture at the Yale Club of New York about photographing climate change in Greenland.