Meet Mati Ficara

We had the good fortune of connecting with Mati Ficara and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Mati, why did you pursue a creative career?
I wasn’t a very strong student in traditional academics, but I always thrived in creative spaces. If you put a math test in front of me it would end in disaster, but if you ask me how to conceptualize a song into a visual aesthetic I can make it happen within minutes. My mom put me in dance when I was 3, so having the arts around me that early definitely helped. It fueled my interest and pushed me into music, theater, and eventually photography.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Photography is genuinely one of the greatest things in my life. I love working with movement, but I also have a soft spot for conceptual portrait work. Combining both turned out to be my strong suit and I hit my stride from there. It’s really incredible, to sit in this niche and have people want to work with me. Getting to this point was a feat for me. I got to college with significantly less experience than my classmates, and I had to spend my first two years of school trying to catch up. I moved to New York thinking I wanted to shoot in theater, and learned pretty quickly that it isn’t what fueled me. I’m also a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to my art, which didn’t help my case. I constantly used to feel the need to one up myself and always do better than my last project, especially as one of the only artists in my family. It took a lot of encouragement from my community and even more patience with myself to get to where I am today. I learned a lot about balance – I lost myself heavily in my work and felt like I had no identity without photography. One pandemic and a move across the country later – the passion for photography has come back tenfold, but this time with a much healthier outlook. Being an artist with hobbies and a social life serves me a lot better than being just a photographer. Getting lost in the specifics can be suffocating to your creativity.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I love having my friends visit me in LA and getting to show them why I love this place so much. Bread ‘N Butter, Dialog, or Aroma are necessary for breakfast/brunch coffee. Always a need visit to The Grove, a flea market, and Abbott Kinney. If there’s a show at Hollywood Bowl we’re going, and I’ve recently started attempting to get all my friends interested in pickleball. Every extra minute is spent outside, as a lot of my visitors are from the east coast and are more than happy to just sit in the sun. I’m only on my second year in LA and there is genuinely so much left to explore. I feel so grateful every day to live in such a vibrant, hopeful, resilient city, and I can’t wait for many more years to come.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I credit all of my success to Verser Engelhard, he was my favorite professor at Columbia College where I got my degree in photography. Verser pushed me to be the absolute best version of myself and gave me every relevant piece of information I would ever need to thrive as a photographer. My work when I started college to now is night and day, and I have him to thank for that.

Website: matificaraphoto.com

Instagram: @matificaraphoto