Vestiges and Bloom is a photographic celebration of London’s Docklands, where my studio is based.

Showcasing large scale photographic still lives, each imposing colour image combines found materials and opulent flower compositions.

The found materials featured testify to the area’s rich maritime, commercial and industrial past and they are sourced from derelict industrial sites and from the docks.

Bricks, weathered rope, chain, metal and wood fragments: all relics of the powerful impulse the docks gave to the area, to the country at large, and to world trade.

These objects are arranged and photographed with lavish flower designs to evoke and symbolise the force of regeneration now energising the area again.

Images are captured using the soft, diffused light employed by 17th century Flemish painters.

They are informed by the tradition of still life painting and delight with vibrant colour and nuanced tonal range.

The photographs’ impactful presence and size belies a delicate and intricate level of finer and finer detail as the viewer approaches each piece.

All Images Copyright Michele Turriani 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Composed and lit in the style of the masters of Mannerist and Baroque painting, the imagery of Memento Exstingui proposes a radical shift in the paradigm of the genre. The human skull of the Vanitas or Memento Mori painting is substituted by an animal one. The viewers are invited to review their existential questioning beyond the confines of their own individual destiny and to embrace their position within the natural world. All the skulls featured belong to animals on the Red List of Threatened Species. The title of the series, Memento Exstingui, offers an insight into the essay's symbolic approach. It paraphrases Memento Mori and it shifts the focus to the more holistic existential concern of extinction, open in the latin to be interpreted as the loss of the individual or of a whole species. Memento Exstingui was shot in collaboration with the Powell-Cotton Museum. The images were taken in a temporary studio set up on the museum’s premises and feature specimens from the Edwardian collection. As customary in the Vanitas genre skulls are juxtaposed to objects symbolising transience, delusions, and the ephemeral nature of existence. The series was created as a meditation on the changing perception of the place of mankind within nature and our close relation to fellow animal life. The pictorial overall quality of the images belies formidable photographic detail and they have been created to be viewed and appreciated in very large print format.

All Images Copyright Michele Turriani 2024. All Rights Reserved.

The Seasons in Season is an exploration of the natural state of flux found in an English garden’s plants between the months of April and November.

In this series I explore the natural cycles of the growing season through the kaleidoscope of the flora at Goodnestone Park, in Kent.

All Images Copyright Michele Turriani 2024. All Rights Reserved.

These studies are the testing ground for new ideas and techniques and the beginning of new bodies of work.

All Images Copyright Michele Turriani 2024. All Rights Reserved.

A selection of portraits commissioned by commercial clients and institutions.

All Images Copyright Michele Turriani 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Dock Lands People documents the Royal Docks and their community at a time of fast and radical change.

After years of inactivity what was once the world's largest port is finding itself once again at the centre of huge investment and opportunity.

The essay explores the architecture and the structures that constitute its heritage as well as the intangible history as found in the surviving original communities and people that worked at the Docks and lived in their immediate proximity.

All Images Copyright Michele Turriani 2024. All Rights Reserved.

“Jawhar” is a photographic essay shot in Marrakech and its environs for a limited edition prestige pubblication. It provides an idealised perspective on a land of contrasts.

All Images Copyright Michele Turriani 2024. All Rights Reserved.