PHOTOGRAPHERS | Zonzo Studio
Simona and Angelo from Zonzo Studio are based in central Italy and create timeless images, mainly shooting in digital format with some film. The duo's style blends documentary and portraiture, prioritising presence over direction. They consistently put people before the photograph and understand when to set the camera aside and when to capture a moment. Working as a duo allows them to observe their couples, and they limit the number of weddings they take on each year to ensure they can dedicate time and care to each of their couples. Zonzo Studio travel worldwide and dream of photographing weddings in Asia, particularly China.
Tell us about your business!
We are Simona and Angelo. We met in a small office in provincial Italy, and after six months at neighbouring desks we were in love and left together. We opened a small communications agency, and photography kept taking up more space inside it until, by 2015, there was no room left for anything else. We married two years later and we have worked side by side every day since. The name comes from andare a zonzo, which is Italian for wandering with nowhere in particular to be, and wandering is what brought us to destination weddings in the first place.
What would you like couples to know about you?
We are both there from the beginning of the day to the end, and we never split up. Simona stays close to the couple, near enough to notice what they need before they do, while Angelo is out among the guests, learning names and usually ending up on the dance floor. When someone is nervous, a word or a hand is worth more to us than the photograph we lose while we give it, and the pictures we like best tend to arrive a few minutes later anyway.
Where are you based?
We live in a farmhouse in Abruzzo, on the Adriatic side of central Italy, where we are both from and where we grow a good part of what we eat. The garden sets the rhythm of our weeks at home, and for the rest of the year we are away.
Do you travel for weddings?
All of our work happens away from home. We photograph across Italy, from Tuscany and Rome to Puglia, Sicily, the Amalfi Coast and Lake Como, and regularly in Spain, France, Portugal and Greece, as well as in the United States and Hong Kong. We take no more than fourteen weddings a year, because we would rather not give up either half of our life, and that number is also what allows us to travel properly for the ones we do take.
How would you describe your style?
We describe our work as artistically directed, which sits somewhere between documentary and portraiture. It is not traditional and it is not posed. We photograph the day as it happens, and where we do guide, we guide through the relationship we have built with the people rather than through direction. We call it The Art of Presence.
What inspires you?
Old family albums, more than anything hanging in a gallery. The photographs that stay with us are the faded ones where nobody was performing, a hand resting on a shoulder or a quiet smile, and they still feel like home decades later. The rest comes from where we live, a farmhouse where the garden decides what our week looks like and teaches us, every year, that the things worth having are rarely the ones that were scheduled.
How would you describe your working style?
The first thing we ask for when we arrive is a coffee. We do want it, being Italian, but it is also the quickest way to let a room know that nobody is late and nothing is an emergency. That pace is what we bring to the rest of the day.
Do you shoot digitally, on film or both?
Both, with intention. Around 85% of the day is photographed on digital, which gives us the reliability we need to document everything that matters, and the remaining 15% is what we call our film highlights, used for portraits and details where we enjoy experimenting with different cameras and stocks.
Trends come and go, so we use film to enhance the story rather than to define it, and the gallery you are left with should still hold up in twenty years.
Where would you love to travel to for work?
Asia, and China above all. We have started learning Chinese, which is going slowly, because we would like to be able to work there one day without having everything translated for us. It is the part of the world we are most curious about at the moment, and we would go tomorrow.
Who is your dream client?
Someone who wants to be the main character of their own wedding day rather than the person running it from backstage. The couples we work best with have handed the planning over and have decided to actually live the day, and the difference shows in every photograph. When nobody is checking the timeline or worrying about what comes next, people are simply present, and that is when a day starts to look like itself.
What is your advice to couples getting married?
Leave more air in the timeline than anyone tells you to. The moments that end up mattering are almost never the ones that were scheduled, and they need somewhere to happen.
ZONZO Studio
Website: www.zonzo.studio
Instagram: @zonzo_ph
