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My real name is Leonardo Damiani, born in 1962 in that city that history has always referred to as Rome.

But I love calling myself gruppogarage…

All small letters…

It makes me feel less alone.

Even by myself, when I talk to the photographer in me, I talk to gruppogarage.

Photography has always been in me - my grandfather was a photographer and he took care of me often when I was little.

So when people used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grow up, I I had already decided to be a photographer.

Everything I studied was related to photography, and actually, so was all the work I've done since.

I have a diploma in photography and I teach it as well.

I started showing my photographs (what a fool!) in 1982.

Since then the desire to be the "primadonna" of an important artistic event took hold of me -to the point of making me forget the message…

I've shown in almost all the galleries in Italy, and in a number of foreign ones, too…

To figure out in the end that it's all a big bore and that the public doesn't care about your work after all - they just care about your image…

As if the package is more important than the contents…what a drag!

All this was an insult to my models…

And to my own eroticism which is what created the internal images that I then transformed into photos…

And so I pulled out of the galleries and the openings all full of fake smiles and decided to transform myself into a group…

A multiple and many-sided identity, not identifiable with a single individual...

that was in 1993 and I wasn't alone yet.

And so, like a "borg", I began to assimilate the other photographers I encountered…

I assimilated everything I admired…

Transforming it into a virtual identity…

A presence on Internet.

And it's been Internet that has really made it possible for me to show my work…

To understand and to get to know…

To encounter other ways of thinking to assimilate…

Including yours right now.