Open Theme nominee

With this project I aimed at visualising electricity. We live with electricity being ubiquitous around us and, yet, we never see it.

Our lives would be very different without electricity: no electronic devices, no computers, no white goods, no TV, no illumination in our homes, no recorded music, no air conditioning, and the list goes on.

So, what does electricity look like? One way of visualising it is through creating small-scale lightening, similar to the ones that occur naturally in the sky when whether storms develop.

With a bit of DIY and leveraging the precious legacy that Nicola Tesla left us, I built a small “lightening generator”. With that done, I was able to then visualise and capture one of the manifestations of electricity.

The results are striking “electric trees”, as electricity dissipates through air forming tree-like structures, with various branches reaching out through the air.

Ultimately, this is a tribute to electricity, which became such a fundamental component of our civilisation.

Gianfranco Merati (b. Asmara, Eritrea, Africa) is an Italian photographer based in London.


Gianfranco’s motivation as a photographer is that ‘beauty is everywhere’. He seeks to reveal it.


For the last decade he has been developing his photographic practice, through building skills and reflecting on projects. Influenced by living in Africa and then Italy, as well as time spent in other parts of the world, he photographed his surroundings. While travelling and living in different locations, he captured images that epitomized the place or documented encounters with people living there. During this period, he created several projects in Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan and China.


As his practice grew Gianfranco’s observation turned to investigation and he started developing abstract photography within a studio setting. Exploring the complex geometry found within nature, he has created many photographic series including projects revealing tessellating patterns within insects’ wings; magnetic fluid ‘pulled’ into rippling miniature landscapes; and the delicacy of flowers encased in ice.


Using both high tech methods and innovative use of basic means, each final image is exacting and verging on the unreal. This, despite the fact that Gianfranco does not manipulate his images to create any illusions in his work.