Giancarlo Derchie
- Michael Hanna
- May 1
- 2 min read
Giancarlo Derchie is a scenic photographer and visual effects creative director who has worked on major film releases such as The Book of Eli, The A-Team, Prometheus, The Great Gatsby, and I, Frankenstein. He describes his work as “deeply connected to color and light, with a focus on revealing the silent stories of the world—the fleeting moments that surround us. In my work, I strive to preserve the integrity of each moment, capturing it as purely as possible”.
Often photographing the ocean as well as surfers heading out on titanic waves, Giancarlo shoots recreational beach life with a mindset of man versus sea. Shooting in both analogue and digital film with a Hasselblad 907 cd 50 and a 45 mm digital, he captures both a grainy and sfumato-like atmosphere of his subjects, followed by an astonishing level of detail of his theme. His cropped compositions reveal surfers on the open sea as if captured from a boat, plane, or pier, and his beach scenes are portrayed as serene barren landscapes or scenes of vivid life and active recreation with figures engaging in activity.
These poetic works convey a volume of how the ocean and shoreline speaks to the human soul. Giancarlo often captures motifs which express beach life like petrified wood fences on the sand or a lifeguard’s perch. Sometimes simply capturing the open shoreline has garnered him recognition such as an honorable mention from the International Travel Awards. Few photographers capture the shore and ocean as vividly as Giancarlo Derchie with his excellent compositions, metaphorical imagery, and scaling of distant figures and objects against the wide shot of the beach landscape.
Manhattan Beach (pictured above) displays a perfectly cropped scene of a surfer on the open ocean. How Giancarlo managed to capture such an angle remains a mystery, perhaps from a heightened pier or cliffside off the shore. The vivid streaming white of the seafoam fizzes like opening a can of sparkling water and the intense turquoise green of the water in an open expanse further explains Giancarlo’s fascination with the theme of man versus ocean.
Giancarlo Derchie invokes mythological connotations with his depictions of the ocean like Odysseus in The Odyssey trapped in the endless void and expanse of the open sea. His carefully cropped compositions and deep hues of the water along with the serene shoreline appears like an oasis amidst an open barren desert. His works invoke the spirit of an explorer, whether his depiction of surfers or open recreation on the beach through people playing volleyball, the scenes appear natural and documentative but captured with a sense of theatrics and grand presentation. The grain and detail within his photography almost as if invoked from the beach sand into the atmosphere and he seems to capture the ocean at ideal times revealing a sense of mist and dew in the air. A grand visual artist, Giancarlo Derchie expresses serenity, adventure, and even intimidation of the imposing form of the ocean and the open landscape of the shore.
