Marzia Gamba

Marzia Gamba was an Italian photographer and art director with a rare gift for turning the ordinary into something quietly extraordinary.

Born in 1987, she grew up on the Adriatic coast near Pesaro, in a family where creativity and craft were part of everyday life — her sisters Flavia and Milla, her father Cesare, an entrepreneur in textiles, and her mother Anna, an architect and jewellery designer. That world shaped her from the very start.

She studied at Central Saint Martins in London, then earned a degree in Graphic Design and Art Direction at NABA in Milan. A hunger to follow photography wherever it led took her to Rome — where she learned the craft of darkroom printing under the legendary Claudio Abate — and on to New York, where she completed her studies at the International Center of Photography and opened her own studio in Brooklyn.

Her work began in reflection: mirrors, symmetry, the skyline and carousels of New York folded into strange new shapes. But it was in still life that she found her voice. In her signature series, I Like Food Better Than People, fruit and flowers became living protagonists — a whole story held inside a grape, a glass, a single bloom. Over a decade her series multiplied: the playful pandemic still lifes of Corona Glam, the eggs opening into flower in Renaissance, the tender humour of Jelly Boobs, the luminous poppies of Papavery — each built with patient, exacting attention to colour, light and composition. The critic Maria Vittoria Pinotti called them her “visionary truths”: images that don’t simply record the world, but quietly remake it.

Her eye was sought far beyond the gallery — by clients in food, wine, jewellery and luxury, among them Prada, Campari, Ruinart and Estée Lauder. She exhibited in New York, Miami, Paris and Milan, founded photography studios in Brooklyn and Milan, and gave her time to magazines that championed emerging photographers.

In 2022 she met Dominick, who was by her side until the end. Marzia left us far too soon, in 2025. This website exists to keep her work in the world — and to give her spirit somewhere to keep being.