About Dana andolfatto - miami portrait photographer

I started this work because of a sentence I heard myself say out loud one day that I could not shake.

I was talking about a client, a physician and mother of three who had achieved more by 44 than most people manage in a lifetime, and I said: “She hadn’t recognized herself in her own photographs in years.”

And I realized I was describing almost every woman I had ever worked with. And I was describing myself.

I have spent my entire career studying how women are seen. As a model, I learned how the lens constructs an image of a woman, and how rarely that image belongs to her. As an academic, I studied the distance between who a woman is and who the world decides she should be. As a mother, I lived it.

Every chapter taught me the same thing from a different angle: women disappear into their competence. They become so good at holding everything together that no one thinks to look at them, really look, and ask what they see when they finally look at themselves.

I picked up a camera because I realized I had been trained for this work my entire life. Not trained in a classroom. Trained by living inside the exact experience I now photograph women through. I understand light, composition, and the technical craft of portraiture, but what I understand most is the woman standing in front of me. Because I have been her.

That is the work. And I am not done.

This work exists because of a truth I could not unlearn.

Meet Dana