Nirav Patel is a San Francisco based fine art photographer whose emotive portraiture is inspired by quiet moments. His signature pieces often involve molding both natural and artificial light in dramatic ways to draw attention to expression and emotion. In Sanskrit, my name means “quiet”. It’s completely coincidental that the subject I chose to explore with photography is quiet moments.
Photography/art was not a part of my life until I was in my late twenty’s. I was born in Ahmedabad, India and moved to US with my family at the age of two. I studied to become a Civil Engineer at the University of Davis in California.
One day, after looking through my parents wedding album, I realized how important the preservation of memories is. So I bought a small point and shoot digital camera and began learning. My love for photography grew and soon became an obsession. I originally began with wedding photography because it was the preservation and documentation of memories that I was most drawn to.
As my career as a wedding photographer grew, I started to experiment with light and portraiture to grow as an artist. At first, I took portraits to simply create beautiful imagery. However, I soon learned about intentionality and began to understand what it was I truly wanted to share. This is was the beginning of my series of portraiture that depicts the beauty of solitude and quiet moments.
This is also what led me to create the project titled The Great Blue World with my dear friend Meredith Adelaide. We created a book with visuals and text that deals with the topic of loss and processing grief, which is a subject very close to both of our hearts. Unvael Collective recently published the book in late 2018.