Impossible Postcard (Grande Plage, Saint-Jean-de-Luz) Photograph

Photographer Francesco Mursia (Italian-American, b.1974) was born in Vicenza, Italy, in a three generations family of sculptors. As a teenager, he went to a painter's studio to learn portraiture and, at the same time, discovered photography, thanks to a camera gifted by his parents. Still, he soon dropped his artistic studies following personal events. In 2010 Mursia moved to North America and brought an SLR camera with which he created his first two series, LandEscapes and DTLS (2011). His first group exhibition was in 2012 at Berkeley's gallery Collector. After that experience, Mursia did photography sporadically. He didn't focus on photography again until 2020, after moving to France, when he began exploring a new artistic style in landscape photography. His first new series, Impossible Postcards (2021-ongoing), constituted of conceptual landscapes, expanded his audience internationally. During the winter of 2021, he began incorporating his own artistic style into portraiture, which took him to create Les Surfers (2022-ongoing), comprised of portraits of everyday surfers before and after surfing on the Cote des Basques in Biarritz, France. Mursia, for this series, used models that depart from the typical image we associate surfers with, including women and people of color, elderlies, and diverse couples. For Playa Life (2022), Mursia photographed each day Burning Man goers momentarily pausing their wandering to gaze into the lens from the scenic spot of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.