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Biography

Award-winning photographer Daniel Castonguay is a street photographer based in Montreal, Canada. He is, among others, the winner of the "Fine Art Photo of the Year 2019", at the prestigious Monovisions Photography Awards in London. Daniel started photography in 1979 as an extracurricular activity and without completely putting aside his passion for photography, he continued his studies and obtained a professional degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi, Canada in 1989. 

Over the years, he has distinguished himself in the international arena by winning several prestigious awards. Without naming them all, in 2020 he won first prize in the Fine Art category at the Creative Communications Awards in Los Angeles, a competition that brings together several imaging companies of all styles. 

With over a dozen international exhibitions to his credit, Daniel is proud to have exhibited at the Complexe Di Santa Chiara in Vercelli, Italy for the "Letterature Urbane 6" exhibition. His work was auctioned off and the proceeds donated to the "Fondazione AIRC" for cancer research. 

In recent years, Daniel has been published more than 50 times internationally and translated into over 10 languages. Daniel invites you to read one of his most recent articles published in Jugaad magazine. He considers this article to be one of the best he has written and it describes him very well. We invite you to visit his fascinating world. 

https://jugaadmag.com/daniel-castonguay-ephemeral-nature-of-reality/ 

Artistic approach

Living in a big city, he was naturally drawn to street photography and depicting everyday life in its simplest form. When he started in this field of photography, he worked according to the established standards of the style and at a certain point, he got tired of not being able to illustrate the mood of the "moment". In order to give a more authentic feel to his work, which was bold and heavily influenced by the early 20th century Pictorialist movement and artists such as Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Demachy and Leonard Misonne, he began to process his imagery to make it a bit more mysterious. This had the effect of combining simple moments of life with his state of mind, resulting in a unique style of "creative street photography", hence the name of his "Quotidian Life" series. 

Part of his work as a "creative street photographer" is to bring this everyday life into a world of fantasy, something related to abstraction. This creates a duality, a paradox, the paradox of ordinary life in a world that exists only in one's own imagination and can literally be anything and everyone can relate to it. 

For Daniel, photography is a mode of expression just like writing or music. Conveying an emotion is the essence of his photographic work, taking the viewer on a journey. More precisely, to make the viewer travel in a world of reverie, leaving all the space to the imagination. 

As Daniel says so well, "Being a street photographer is first and foremost playing a role in urban life, contributing to its liveliness, its rhythm and almost belonging to a chaotic scenario. For me, street photography is more than an image-making endeavor, it is part of an ongoing theatrical sketch where I play the role of a silent character. " 

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