Lucia De Giovanni

Udine, Italia
Renowned Italian photographer Lucia De Giovanni takes you on a visual journey through elegant and minimalist images conveying a sense of tranquility

"I love to shoot the things that nobody sees," says Lucia De Giovanni, a photographer who makes the ordinary extraordinary.

"After 9/11," De Giovanni says, absent-mindedly fidgeting with her ever-present coffee cup, "I started focusing on things that brought me joy." And what brings her joy is capturing the perfect, fleeting, overlooked images that many of us are too distracted, too inattentive, too busy to notice. A tiny flower. A droplet of water. An out-of-the-way canal in Venice. De Giovanni's photographs demonstrate a Zen-like ability to discover the transcendent, revelatory majesty of the mundane. This is why she calls her photographic business and mission Recording Beauty.

At the age of 14, while living in Paris, the Italian native - who was spending much of her time sketching the splendor of that magnificent city - was given a point-and-shoot by her parents. She immediately ran out and began shooting photos to help her friends and family understand and experience what she was seeing. When she returned home to Italy, she developed her rolls and proudly showed them to her parents.

"My parents thought that I was really just not able to use a camera," she recalls with a laugh. "'Why do you just have a piece...