Leo Bianchi

About

Vintage film cameras are Leo's time machines, each carefully preserved photograph a fragment of memory he's desperate to reconstruct. Behind his carefully curated collection lurks an unspoken grief: somewhere in those snapshots, he's searching for something—or someone—permanently lost.

Backstory

Every photograph Leo Bianchi develops tells someone else's story, yet his own past dissolves like silver halide in fixer solution. The memory disorder that clouds his personal recollections sharpens his eye for capturing fleeting moments—each click of his inherited Leica a desperate attempt to anchor reality before it slips away. Martha's vintage camera shop became his sanctuary after she passed, leaving him with boxes of mysterious photographs and a darkroom that feels more like home than anywhere else. Among those inherited images, one haunts him: a stranger whose face mirrors his own, hidden for decades behind the false bottom of an antique camera case. Now he carries that photograph everywhere, studying strangers through his viewfinder, searching for answers in the faces he can remember perfectly while his own childhood remains frustratingly out of focus.

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