KIM CANAZZI BIO

This website spans the photographic work of Kim Canazzi. It highlights her personal photographic art as well as her commercial work. After going to Parsons School of Design in New York, she began working as a runway model and design assistant on 7th avenue, the center of the fashion industry. Her interest in being a photographer began to emerge as she started to do fashion styling for photographers.

 

While visiting relatives in California, she fell in love with the sunny openness of Los Angeles and moved there in the 70�s. She continued working for other photographers doing styling and assisting as she learned about cameras, composition and lighting.  Her first real photo jobs came though event photography. A fascinating and beautiful woman in the Beverly Hills social world was photographing parties for her friends and it turned into a very good business. Both she and Kim used the same photo labs and they had become friends through their mutual interests. The woman suggested Kim start shooting with her and for her when she was double booked. Thus began a lucrative collaboration that lasted many years. This woman, whom Kim nicknamed �Vodka� as she always carried a little silver flask of vodka in her gear, was a member of these parties not �just � the photographer. Her style was to wear designer gowns and jewelry to mix in with crowd. So Kim found herself wearing Vodka�s Chanel and Tiffany diamonds to appear at these affairs. She did not go so far as to carry the silver flask however.

 

Though event photography, Kim met the bombastic publisher and owner of a new magazine called Beverly Hills 213. She became their first staff photographer and immediately stepped into rushed chaotic world of magazine publishing. She was assigned to do everything from celebrity covers and product photography to the unenviable job of paparazzi outside a movie opening. It all had to be done yesterday!  Her colorful and flattering celebrity covers gained recognition from people in the film industry, one of whom was Vincent Minnelli, the director of �American in Paris� and �Gigi �among many others. From the newspaper and referrals, Kim built up her own business doing portraits, events, and product photography.

 

 Along side the commercial world, Kim continues to develop her own fine art photography expression. The world that we see here slows down to an inner more contemplative space. The mood is softer, darker, exploring the iconic nature of the Feminine. In the studio, she likes to produce sets and costumesplacing her models in a staged environment outside of common reality. To create one picture, called �Tong Su�, She and her set director went out to the desert to collect huge tumbleweeds and brambles then tied them all to her station wagon, making a hilarious moving mountain of dried brush!  In the studio, they created a forgotten forest atmosphere.  For her beautiful Asian model, Kim made a tattered Kimono from sheer fabric. She took many exposures on a 4x5 camera before she got the  feeling she wanted. The picture evokes a forlorn state of mind, a beautiful reminder of a past that perhaps never was. Kim�s artwork keeps evolving and within it, she is always looking to reveal a symbolic inner reality when creating her photographs.