It is the midst of our conversation, and Luca holds up a book to the screen; it’s titled ‘No Straight Road Gets You There: Tales for Uneven Terrain’, by Rebecca Solnit. Luca exclaims that “the author writes about contemporary issues without resigning to hopelessness. It’s refreshing. I read an essay in the morning — okay gang, we can do this. Realistic, intersectional, yet hopeful. A balm for the soul.” The book details, across its fragmented essays, the way in which hope can coexist with grief; how one might continue to move forward without denying the darkness of the time we live in. 

I wasn’t expecting our conversation to err towards the existential, but I suppose it’s inevitable when speaking with an artist whose practice is entirely rooted in a bodhisattva-style commitment to presence. Luca Vincenzo’s insistence on sincerity — on meeting life without the hardened armour of jadedness — sits at the core of his worldview, and by consequence, his work. It’s an ethos that asks him to continually strip away: the layers of jargon, pretence, intellectualisation, and distraction, until only what is essential remains. What’s left is something disarmingly pure; Luca’s way, is a way of seeing that recognises beauty as enough. His image and filmmaking are entirely the result of this disposition. 

On his creative beginnings, Luca explains that when he was a child, his mother would send him and his sister to art classes over the long summer holidays; mostly to keep them out of trouble. “My sister was always considered the creative one, and I really internalised that,” he says. “I didn’t think I had anything particularly ‘artistic’ in me. I did, however, love theatre in high school; being on stage brought me a lot of joy.” It wasn’t until years later that it dawned on Luca that the creative, animating principle he recognised in others was inborn in him too, reminiscing that, “some friends were photographers and I started tagging along, art-directing little shoots for bands I was involved with. Eventually I picked up a camera, shot a roll of film, and when the pictures came back I had quite a shock — ‘wait, I made that?’ That was a surprise that opened a door: maybe I could be creative too? I discovered it, and what a gift.”

Luca’s image-making is some of the most enriching and honest that I have seen. If photography is a contemporary invention driven by the instinct of human beings to use light to capture ourselves in time — and, in some ways, to escape it — then Luca’s portrayals of people and scenes are acts of witnessing those throes of time as close to the bone, as possible. 

This is image-making that traces the essence of the subject beyond their surface; documenting something essential to Luca’s practice — an innate ability to draw out the sheer importance of the moment he is capturing. Whether it’s flower sellers on the N2, faithful women descending from the Hawequas Mountains, or a stark portrait of someone gleaming with the wrinkles only a life well-lived could shape, Luca’s framing of them, and of the moment itself, carries the energetic conviction that it matters. That moment mattered, and their lives in the world matter — not because Luca is insisting that they do, nor because the image demands it, but simply because they are there. Their existence, unadorned, is enough.

Is there a more honest purpose for photography? 

“I’m drawn to portraiture in an existential way rather than an academic one,” Luca says, explaining that his approach is more an intervention into a moment in time, than anything else; “the portrait is a residue of the real thing I’m seeking — a brief, human moment with a stranger. Cities are rivers of inner worlds; everyone is the centre of their own universe, all that complexity walking past you. To interrupt that flow gently — ‘Excuse me, may I make your portrait?’ — and to be welcomed… it’s intimate.”

What Luca describes, in essence, is his version of social alchemy; a micro-communion between strangers that reaffirms his faith in the world. It seems simple (which it is), but the sheer ability to interject in someone’s life, at a time when the physical and digital are so mediated, and it feels as though we all exist worlds apart from one another, is profound.“I wouldn’t call it community in the formal sense,” he reflects, “but there are these tiny fibres of connection that get spun in a few seconds. You’re altering the programming of someone’s day, and they’re altering yours. That feels quietly sublime to me.” The unguarded exchanges, devoid of any pretence, is what anchors Luca’s work, and it’s this sensitivity toward engagement which exists as a creative principle across all his work; the personal and commercial, alike. “My process is to not overthink. I go out when something in me feels hungry for contact. On days when a walk doesn’t solve the mind, approaching people often does — I come home feeling like the world is alright again. People are actually kinder than we might fear,” Luca muses. 

The tension between performance and community is an undercurrent in Luca’s process. Aside from his commercial work — which, though shaped by his sensitivity, is inevitably curated — so, Luca is drawn to the unpredictability of the street. “In Berlin there’s a reputation for standoffishness compared with South Africa, and yes, sometimes the first look is a scowl. The craft is in those first two or three seconds: disarm the person, let them feel they can trust you, that you have no angle. A sincere compliment helps — ‘Your hair looks wonderful; may I make your portrait?’ You can almost watch the fence dissolve; someone feels seen.”

That instinct to connect, to perform without artifice, sometimes reveals itself in unexpected ways, most notable as in a story that Luca shares, in which “after years of shooting you can still make a spectacularly dumb mistake. I spent two days on the street, met fascinating people, watched the frame counter tick past 36 and thought, ‘why hasn’t it asked me to rewind?’ The spool hadn’t caught the film.” He laughs at the memory, describing it as “cosplaying as a photographer.” The irony, Luca says, was that “the performance was real — the approach, the exchange, the permission, the little moment we built together — but there was nothing to show for it. Oddly, I loved the lesson. It reminded me that the encounter is the point, and the picture is only one way of honouring it.”

I think of the categorisation we try so hard to impose; the endless naming, positioning, defining, and while it’s not to say that Luca is uninvolved in these frameworks, there is a measure of distance between him and the machinery of self-making; Luca seems disengaged with the common  pursuit of one’s art as a means to become someone, rather than as a mode of being someone already. Most crucially, oneself. His work is driven by a wish to be in relationship with the world. “I never studied art or photography, so I’m not fluent in the jargon,” Luca says. “I respond to nature, colour, people in their spaces; I like watching how life arranges itself. That description wouldn’t pass muster on a gallery wall, but baroque language about a leaf on the ground doesn’t move me either.” Of this idea — that verbosity and scripting on gallery walls serves as a kind of justification for the legitimacy of one’s work — Luca is especially resistant. “I used to worry that simply presenting beauty wasn’t ‘enough’. Now I think it is. The life in me is the life in you and in everything; the photograph is life showing itself to other life. That’s not an idea I need to over-justify — it’s something I recognise when I see it.”

Luca is South African-Italian, living between Berlin and Cape Town, a rhythm he describes with both affection and unease. “I live between Cape Town and Berlin and I’m forever questioning the arrangement. I miss home — the people, the nature, and the version of myself that exists in South Africa. At the same time, moving between places has given me perspectives I’m grateful for. It keeps me awake to who I am and who I might be.”

It has been a threshold year, Luca shares. There is a forthcoming inclusion in a Penguin group photobook with Italia Segreta reflecting this multiplicity of belonging, of which Luca “is representing Puglia, where my grandmother is from and where I’ve been photographing for five years. I didn’t chase the iconic locations; I went to the ordinary places she remembered — her inland town, a modest local beach. Year after year I’d return and see the same groups of friends with grapes and leftover pasta, watching the sun go down.” As a child of the diaspora, Luca’s inclusion demonstrates the borderless nature of heritage, and how it lives in the repetition of return and commitment, over any kind of geographical boundary. 

When I ask Luca whether he feels any particular responsibility in his role as a photographer, he answers without hesitation. “I struggle to imagine my ‘role’ as anything grander than trying to live well and be decent. One of the purest thrills is when someone outside the art world stops at an image and says, ‘That’s beautiful.’” I mention that we live in a time when one’s art is often treated as a personal brand, to which Luca immediately recoils. “The pressure to be a brand unto yourself feels awful to me. If I have a motto, it’s embarrassingly simple: try not to be a brand! That clarity is one gift of getting older — you start stripping away the messaging and ask, ‘who am I without all that?’” Luca recalls a lesson from a production designer that has since stayed with him: “Perfect isn’t when there’s nothing left to add; it’s when there’s nothing left to take away. I think about that in pictures and in life. The work now is subtraction — removing what’s not essential so that it can breathe.”

What next, for Luca? “I’m still making street portraits — and yes, the last roll actually loaded,” he laughs. “I’ve also launched gathered.studio to cover weddings, elopements and nuptials on 8mm and 16mm film. Honestly, it brings me more fulfilment than making a brand happy. You’re using your craft to honour love and to give families something to keep.”

Beyond that, Luca’s gaze is turning toward movement, “I’m moving further into short filmmaking,” he says, “ I want to create small, honest vignettes following people whose worlds intrigue me: I have a friend who is a a scientist who communicates about living with the forest; and another friend who gathers from the mountains and makes tinctures. Photographs can be beautiful little liars; film, at its best, lets a fuller truth breathe.”

Lastly, Luca’s final manifesto for a life of presence is to “notice what you’re using to distract yourself and set it down. Return to yourself, to your people, to nature — and to your relationships with all three. There is no isolated ‘I’; there is a ‘we’. Keep imagining an ideal future and, in small ways, try to live as if it’s already arriving.” It’s an apt, concluding  reflection of the spirit that runs through all Luca and his work; and a reminder that I needed, that our attention and sincerity are among the most precious offerings we have for the world. 

So, dear readers, hold them close, and use them wisely.

Written by Holly Beaton

For more news, visit the Connect Everything Collective homepage www.ceconline.co.za

Follow CEC on Instagram

Danielle Mbonu is reflective of Lagos’ essence; a patron saint of the creative chaos, cultural friction, and unapologetic drive that fuel one of the continent’s most potent capitals. As I muse to Dan — as she prefers to be called — the energy between South Africa and Nigeria is one of mutual respect and rivalry; we push and provoke one another, each country a mirror to the other’s ambition. Danielle stands as one of the preeminent figures of Nigeria’s creative ascent, particularly as it emanates out of Lagos; a city that births and builds visionaries daily.

Danielle is a restless experimenter, she moves between photography, film, and direction with the same instinctive ease that defines Lagos itself — quick, intuitive, irreverent. Her collaborations span fashion’s most forward-thinking circles and music’s most magnetic names, yet what seems to endure is the gaze that Dan casts: one that dignifies everyday youth culture and refracts it through a cinematic, opulent lens. As she notes, “Black beauty and opulence” anchors her interests, whether behind a camera or leading a creative vision, Danielle’s work continues to translate the pulse of a generation that is wildly improvisational and endlessly in motion. 

From her early collaborations with global fashion houses like Nike and Off-White to her striking visual debut as one of the artistic directors behind Skepta and Wizkid’s Energy, Danielle’s work has expanded Lagos’ creative lexicon and positioned her as one of the key visual architects of contemporary African culture. It’s mind-bending, then, that Danielle credits her creative genesis only back to 2018 — a year she describes as a cultural ignition point for a new generation. “I think what really started everything for me and made me even just get into photography was just like back in 2018. That was when young people in Nigeria really started taking creativity very seriously,” Dan reminisces, and “that was when we started getting international attention — brands started coming here, that was the first year of the Homecoming festival — and I think that was when we realised this could actually be a thing for us. That was when internationally people started being interested in what we had going on creatively in Nigeria.” It was a moment, she reflects, when Lagos’ underground energy began to crystallise into a global movement; the birth of her career, and the birth of a new era in how the continent’s youth imagined and exported their world. 

Lagos is a city marked by velocity and tension. Nigeria, vast and volatile, is a nation of over 200 million people whose cultural exports — from music to fashion to film — has played a critical hand in asserting the global imagination of Black modernity. Gaining independence just over six decades ago, and with a diaspora that spans every corner of the world, its creative voice has long existed in dialogue with, and sometimes in defiance of, the lingering shadow of British colonial influence. Danielle explains that her drive to reframe Lagos through her lens was born from a refusal to accept the narratives imposed upon it. “I always talk about this and I know people don’t like it, but it has to be said. I think a big problem I see with African creativity and with even how people present Africa and Nigeria — is with a focus on poverty. There is this instinct to want to show the bad parts, that I should take pictures of some poor kids on the street. But I think there are so many different ways to still uphold and show the good parts of where you come from.” This has long been a notion of struggle politics as a lens to elicit sympathy. It is, as we know, only derived from a eurocentric gaze that equates suffering with truth, and beauty with privilege. 

As a visual narrator, Danielle’s philosophy is rooted in an unflinching authenticity and a refusal to perform for external validation or conform to the narratives that often shape how Africa is perceived. For her, beauty is constructed through recognition; a deep seeing of what already exists. “For me, I don’t pretend to be who I’m not,” she says. “A lot of people feel like they should do things a certain way because that’s what’s going to get them traction. But no — I’ve always seen the beauty in where I come from.” In her imagery, Nigeria is mediated through the lens of luminosity and self-possessed confidence; the codes of Blackness that speak of ease and style in a way that can only be born from experience. 

“I always try to capture people in their most rich, most beautiful selves,” Daneille adds. This ethos extends to her visual language across creative direction; and is her insistence on reimagining African beauty in a contemporary form. “I know a lot of times now we don’t really wear our traditional fabrics as much, we don’t really do the hairstyles they used to do back in the day, but I feel like there are still ways to show our culture in a rich way — refreshed and reimagined for this era.”

For Danielle, the current visibility of African culture still feels surreal; a generational shift she’s both witnessed and helped assert. “If someone told me Nigeria or even Africa would be on the global stage like this now, I would never have believed it,” she says. Having studied in the UK during a time when African identity was often met with condescension or invisibility, she recalls the dissonance of being far from home while her culture remained uncelebrated. “It was never cool to be African. It was never cool to be Nigerian. No one listened to Afrobeats, no one wanted to dress African. If you did, people didn’t take you seriously.” Now, Danielle observes the pendulum’s swing with both wonder and pride, emphasising that “just to see the way everyone — even American artists — want to do Afrobeats, everyone is obsessed with African culture… I’m very grateful and happy to exist in this era.” We agree, and abide by the zeitgeist of vindication that feels particularly vital to us at CEC: a generation that has transformed what was once marginalised into the world’s new cultural centre of gravity.

Danielle reminds us that there has never been a better time to be a creative — especially on the African continent. “Back in the day, if you weren’t a doctor or a lawyer, you didn’t have a real job,” she laughs. Yet today, as global eyes turn toward Africa’s creative economies, artists like Danielle have set forth new parameters of possibility; making careers out of imagination and vision. “We’re so lucky to exist in this generation as creatives,” Danielle emphasises. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask Dan about her fabled big break that came through the hands and eye of Skepta; as if the pulse of global culture had suddenly turned its gaze toward Lagos and found her already in motion. Of this turning point, Danielle recalls the convergence of people, music, and possibility that defined 2018 — “the year everything changed,” that she had previously pointed to. 

“That was when Homecoming started and Skepta came to Nigeria, and Naomi Campbell too,” she says. Though she’d been experimenting with photography since university, that moment marked her first proper shoot with her friends — an editorial for Skepta’s collaboration with Off-White. “After we’d worked on that they were like, ‘You guys are fire!’” she laughs. When Skepta returned to Nigeria to work with Wizkid on Energy, he invited Danielle and her peers to handle the creative direction — a leap of faith that would alter her path entirely. “I remember feeling like, I can’t believe this is happening — I have no experience in this!” she says.

I ask Danielle about 2025; “I think this year has been a very defining year,” she says. “I took a break for a bit, and the sad thing about creative work is that when you take a break you need to come back and remind people — like, you know, you’re still here. This year has really helped me shape what I want to do next in terms of my creativity, because I really want to go into video.” After several years of photographing musicians and cultural figures, Daniellee is feeling the pull back to her origins. “I want to shoot fashion films,” she continues. “I’ve been shooting a lot of artists mostly over the last two or three years, and I really want to go back to my roots — more fashion-focused stuff, more personal projects. I have quite a lot of things coming out that haven’t come out yet, but this year I think people are seeing that Dan is going back to her usual style of shooting. I’m excited!”

Lastly, I’m curious about Danielle’s creative philosophy, and her response is deceptively simple: make what feels true, not what feels popular. The rest, she insists, will follow. In an industry all too consumed by validation, Danielle’s stance is affirmed by her maxim that “your audience will always find you,” and “if this is really what you want to do, you have to bet on yourself and just keep doing the work.” For her, the proof is in the present. We’re literally living in a timeline where African creativity sits at the centre of the global conversation. As Dan urges us to remember, there’s never been a better time to be alive, and to be creative and unafraid to take up space in it. Go forth and create.

Written by Holly Beaton

For more news, visit the Connect Everything Collective homepage www.ceconline.co.za

Follow CEC on Instagram