Monica Polonio
“Each project is a journey that begins with an idea and becomes a shared experience of learning and self-discovery.”
Biography
Photographer and designer trained at the School of Art & Design of Alcoy, with a solid background in product and editorial photography, art direction, and digital retouching. Alongside her professional work, she develops personal projects that reflect her most intimate artistic expression.
As a visual artist, her research focuses on the relationship between subject and environment, using photography as a medium to narrate identities and emotions.
Her education is ongoing, and she is currently expanding her studies in forensic photography at the AEICF (Spanish Association of Scientific and Forensic Imaging).
Virtual exhibition
An unexpected journey into the innermost self.
What began as an academic project soon revealed itself as a deeply personal exploration. The End of the Beginning merges the precision of digital photography with the power of visual storytelling to shape an intimate narrative of transformation.
The result is a sequence of hieratic images, expressions held in a silence that longs to be voiced.
The exhibition is conceived as a visual journey, divided into seven sections, where each image flows into the next. We recommend following the gallery numbering to experience it fully, as envisioned by the artist.
The end of the beginning
It all started as my final project for my photography studies at the School of Art, but ended up becoming something much deeper.
One thing was clear to me from the beginning: I wanted to tell a story.
Guided by my interests, I began to investigate the world of women in film and suddenly life led me to a soprano. Although I barely knew the world of opera, I immersed myself in the life and career of Luca, who would later become the protagonist of my story.
I worked on each session with the same enthusiasm and methodology: thinking about the concept, looking for locations, choosing styling, creating atmospheres. In that search, the images took their own course and the narrative was making its way. It was an intense process from which I learned a lot, and it would not have been possible without the people who helped me to get to each photograph as I visualized it in my mind.
After some time, analyzing the work from another perspective, and having changed many things in my personal life, I had a revelation.
I discovered that the whole time the protagonist of the story had been myself.
I had not been able to dissociate between my feelings and my creative work, so I ended up relating some aspects of Luca’s profession with my emotions, and in this way the photographs appeared in my imagination.
I was always clear about the how, but not so much about the why..
In fact, the protagonist herself told me that she did not recognize herself in those expressions that I was asking her, until some time later I was able to confess to her that it was really me who felt that way and that I was expressing myself through her and the photographs.
It was my story. And she, my own mirror.
This work shows through emptiness, loneliness and hieratic expressions, the reality of my feelings in a stage of life in which everything changed for me. A stage that ended, a look that changed, a cruder but more real truth.
It was The end of the beginning.
Monica Polonio
artist
Alcoy (Alicante)
