My name is Julian Piccolo and I am a 30 year old artist photographer living and working in the east bay. My focus is on macro photography and fine art photography and the combination of the two. My work aims to use photography as a tool to uncover visual realities often overlooked or not explored with the kind of depth and detail that macro photography can reveal. Photographing minerals, rocks and also works made by blown glass artists is where my main interests are at the moment, for me this work is a great joy and not really work at all. Minerals are mysterious objects of immense variety beauty, they are like flowers of the rock work.

Turning the macro lens to gaze even deeper into various minerals is akin to looking deeper into the nature of our planet, and our very existence. But for me it is an experience that is outside of science, seeing minerals displayed as objects of art with aesthetics in mind, is much different then seeing them as objects of scientific inquiry and I believe that through viewing minerals artistically it is possible to, as a viewer, engage them on often new and deeper existential levels.