Humans of Red Bull Illume: Federico Modica, photographer
Young, I was very introverted and influenceable. I did my school, and didn’t have many friends and girls. With 17, when I was just about to enter the national athletics team, I got injured. For 1 year I couldn’t run anymore, had knee and foot problems… it was then when I started to take pictures. Even if they weren’t so good, many people wanted to believe in me. I started with normal sports, indoor, skiing, cross-country, volleyball and football, when I realized in 2013 that I got really bored in doing the same thing over and over again. So I contacted some athletes and got passionate about action sports. I wanted to feel what they felt and I tried out freeriding, paragliding! I got involved with the sport, its athletes and started to organize expeditions, one of those lately took us to Greenland.
Photography really shifted my life, my mind and my mood! It gave me the possibility to do things the way I felt them! I could never have done this job before, because if you don’t speak with the athletes, you can just not take the picture. Within these past 2-3 years, I opened so much up to people in general and it was then when the quality of my pictures changed. They became better. More involved! Suddenly, I started to see photography not only as my work, but as a place where energy exchange takes place and where we can all work together in order to tell and write a story!
