Daniel Castonguay  Country: Canada My name is Daniel Castonguay, I’m a freelance street photographer based in Montreal, Canada. I began photography in 1979 as an extracurricular activity. Without completely putting aside my passion for photography, I pursued my studies and obtained in 1989, a Professional Electrical Engineering degree at "Université du Québec à Chicoutimi" in Canada. Living in a great city, I was naturally driven to street photography and depicting quotidian life in its simplest form. When I started in this field of photography, I worked according to the established standards of the style and at a certain point, I got bored of not being able to illustrate the mood of the “moment”. In order to give a more authentic touch to my work, audacious and greatly influenced by the early 20th century pictorialist movement and artists such as Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Demachy and Léonard Misonne, I began to process my imagery to make it a little more mysterious. This had the effect of combining simple moments of life with my state of mind, ending up in a unique "creative street photography" style, hence the name of my series Quotidian Life.

The quotidian life is more or less the same for all with a few variations. A part of my work as a "creative street photographer" is to bring this daily life into a world of fantasy, something related to abstraction. This creates a duality, a paradox. The paradox of ordinary life in a universe that exists only in one's own imagination that can literally be anything but still being able to relate to.
For me, photography is a mode of expression in the same way as writing or playing music. Transmitting an emotion is the essence of my photographic work, bringing the viewer into a story. More specifically, to make the viewer travel in a world of reverie, leaving all the space to imagination.

Being a street photographer is above all playing a role in the urban life framework, contributing to its vivacity, its pace and almost belonging to a chaotic scenario. To me, street photography is more than a “picture making business“, it’s being part of a continuous theatrical sketch where I play the role of a silenced character.

Awards:

First place winner, Creative Communication Award C2A 2020, Los Angeles, USA.
Fine Art photo of the year, Monovisions Photography Awards 2019, London, UK.
First place winner, Pollux Photography Awards 2019, "Fine Art" category, Barcelona, Spain.

https://dancastudios.com/
https://www.instagram.com/daniel.castonguay.165/