THERESE DEBONO

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Therese Debono is a documentary photographer covering places, the streets and portraiture: endangered places, local interiors, and documentary portraiture are amongst the subjects she explores and interprets. 

Her main work with places revolves around the loss of heritage in her country as well as the over development that is currently on-going that is destroying the spirit of the places that once were so powerful and unique in the island of Malta.

 

Therese grew up in Malta. She graduated from the University of Malta with an MFA in Digital Arts and an MA in Cultural Heritage. She currently lectures photography and cultural heritage units at MCAST Institute for Creative Arts, as well as photography units at University of Malta within the departments of Communications and Media and Knowledge Science.

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JAZZ EXPRESSIONS

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Exposed to jazz music since a young age by her father, it was inevitable that the annual Malta Jazz Festival would be the ideal playground for Therese Debono to express herself through the medium of photography. She has been attending this festival since 1996 little knowing that in time, she would also photograph the great artists on stage. Even though Therese never took up music, jazz is still one of her favourite music genres and photographing the event is one of her yearly appointments.

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Jazz Expressions is a project initiated in 2010 featuring artists from the annual Malta Jazz Festival. The performers vary from local to foreign and feature in the iconic setting of Ta’ Liesse at the Valletta Harbour, Malta.

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In portraiture a photographer merely tries to encapsulate the soul of the sitter in a single image. Documentary portraiture especially that of performing artists, calls for a totally different approach. American composer George Gershwin stated that jazz, like life, is best when improvised. Photographing jazz is also an act of improvisation. A portrait of someone is best caught when the sitter is unaware since raw facial expressions and hand gestures function purely in sync with the music rather than put on as an act for the audience.

Jazz expressions is a body of work that attempts to show the various emotions, and passion transmitted by jazz music.

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