Hello there. Your name?
Stefano Galli.

How old are you?
I’m 34.

Where are your from?
I’m from Modena, Italy, although my family isn’t originally from there and we don’t live there anymore. I have lived in Turin, Italy where I graduated, and then Copenhagen where I started working as a photographer. Five years later I moved to London, and for the past 4 years I’ve lived in Los Angeles.

What is photography?
I like to compare photography to poetry, a short and intense poem that gets you dreaming. Sometimes pictures allow me to take deeply emotional journeys – I get feelings so strong that they give me the goosebumps.

Often, I get up in the morning, get in the car and just drive off into the blue all day. For long distances I don’t even have music to listen to. There is nothing I need but to take and look at photographs. Photography has become a daily habit for many years now, and sometimes it can take me to an incredible state of mind or bring me all the way down in no time, which I guess is the power of arts, after all.

What is Cowboys about?
The Cowboys project is the third in a series of works that embodies my 4-year private affair with the US, and my attempt at reconciling my romantic ideas of America as an outsider with my quotidian life in California. With this project, I set out to create a series of photographs about one of the most quintessentially American cultural icons: the cowboy. Generally associated with a spirit of individualism, rugged masculinity, and free will, yet morally ambivalent, the cowboy is a representation of the American psyche.

Where can you be found online?
This is my site, and I’m on Instagram.