Michelle Gardella
Michelle’s life started hard. Poverty. Alcoholism. Abuse. But Michelle is a truth-teller and truth-tellers rise above by letting the truth carry them away.
First Michelle used her camera to tell the truth. She started as a wedding photographer because she had a family and her family needed money and Michelle knew how to hustle. Michelle became one of the top wedding photographers in the world. But wedding photography was not Michelle’s truth. Her truth was found in “taking people to the water, stripping away everything we think defines us, and then taking pictures of them when they have nothing left but themselves.” With these images, Michelle launched her first successful Kickstarter campaign leading to the publication of her first book, River Story.
Now Michelle has a second book coming out, funded by her second successful Kickstarter campaign. This one is about her life. About her story from the hard past to the still hard but heartbreakingly beautiful present and what it took to get here.
Michelle lives in Austin, Texas with her family. Her work has been exhibited in galleries around the country as well as in several books, and she hopes to someday start a nonprofit focused on creative equity.
Some things we talk about…
- how to rise above poverty and abuse to become one of the top 30 photographers in the world
- photography as a truth-telling tool (coming out from behind the lens)
- how your brokenness leads right into your beauty
- launching her first, and second, successful Kickstarter campaign
- playing the game of social media as only a truth-teller can
“When you live through the things that I lived through, fear takes on a different power. When it comes to anything in my creative life I always ask myself, what can you really lose here? What actually is the risk?”
“When you have that fire of truth in your throat it’s either going to burn you alive or you’re going to set it free.”
let’s connect.
letters from my heart about what’s on my mind. the business and the personal.