Fontana Arts - (201) 775-4975

Joe Fontana - Photographer- Fine Art/Conceptual and Commercial Portraiture & Sales- Art Management, Marketing & Consulting services.

Joe Fontana - Photographer - Stylized Portraiture and more.
Retro/Alt Pinup, Fashion, Old-Hollywood, Mod, Headshots, Portfolios, Dance/Performance, and Lookbooks - Custom & Commercial photographic commissions. In-studio or on location.

Fontana Arts, LLC is a Limited Liabilty Company. An LLC is one of those pesky stuffy sounding bureaucratic legal things that we all need to deal with now and again. So now, with that out of the way. I am Joe Fontana of the previously mentioned LLC. Also, Fontana Arts was previously Porcelain Monkey Studios - Fontana Arts was the evolution of growth into other areas.

It's probably pretty obvious that I'm a photographer, and take great joy in photographing people both personally and commercially. Why people? If this doesn't get too lengthy, maybe we can get into that.

What may not be so obvious immediately is some of Fontana Arts other activities: Art Print Sales, Gallery Management & Consulting, Art Reproduction Photography, Art Show Organizing & Judging, Portfolio Consultations....you can start to see a pattern here. 'Art' is my thing in general with my personal focus on photographic arts.

Some ways that my style of photographing has been described?

Powerfully understated

Timeless

Unpretentious

Face-smacking

Engaging

My mind can't seem to resolve how direct this is. This isn't a bad thing.

F*cking Epic

My pledge to you, be you a personal or commercial client, is to bring your vision and mine to the meeting place that lets us create something awesome. Grounded in solid principles of photography and design, but awesome. Really, who doesn't want something awesome to represent themselves or their brand?

So, it looks like there is time to get into 'Why people?'

Way back when I started photographing (mid-1980's - ouch!), I started like many, photographing trees, puddles, a garbage can, and other 'run across' kinds of things. As a matter of fact, 'people' really weren't my thing at all. Then, something started to itch at me, granted there are many a FINE photograph of a tree, a puddle, a garbage can, many of which are part of photographic history. I started to realize that the definitive picture, of subjects like Yosemite's Half Dome were already taken (Half Dome by none other than Ansel Adams). There is a beautiful stoicism to subjects like those of Ansel Adams - and nothing wrong with photographing them - for me, I needed something different.

The different that I needed was people - us - the ever changing, always unpredictable human. I realized that the definitive picture of any given person, the representation that exceeds any prior representations was still "out there". Be it a natural representation or a highly stylized one, this philosophy has become a part of me.

The photographer of photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson had what he called the 'Decisive Moment" as the precise moment that creates a photograph; the moment that everything just 'works'. I have the "Defining Moment", the moment of peak expression; the moment that engages, fascinates and lingers in the mind.

PS: I'm never particularly adverse to shark-jumping either.

Tags: Photographer,Management Service