who we are
As with most small companies, this is a family enterprise. We all participate in different roles, and we all contribute with our experiences and hopes to its growth and success.
Most of the photographs, and at the present time all the artistic transformations, are done by Celia Durand, but we do have a few prints based on photographs taken by other family members.
Celia Durand
I was born in Argentina, where I studied and worked in the educational field before moving with my husband and two small children to New York. There I learned the enjoyment of working with clay, studying with ceramists Halina Mantel and Elaine Braun and with Argentine sculptor Carlos Bartolini. During that time I participated in several group showings and received several awards.
Life took over and I dedicated the next several years after the birth of my youngest son to the upbringing of my kids and the care of my family, but still found time to teach myself the basics of early microprocessors and computers. Children also mean photographs, and so I discovered the excitement and challenges involved in that process.
The road then took us to Washington D.C., just in time for the beginning of the PC era. Proud owner of a very simple computer, I learned programming by reading books and experimenting. I wrote several programs, including The Banner Machine -- which printed large size banners using a dot matrix printer -- and a number of companion utilities for a retail point of sale software package.
Shortly after the 1996 Olympic Games, my family and I moved further south, to Atlanta. North Georgia and its beautiful mountains and waterfalls, teeming with colors and life, awakened in me a need to capture it all. And in no time at all, I also fell under the spell of its coastal towns and islands, with its salty air and sunny friendliness.
As it could be expected in these new times, a digital camera was the logical tool and that also meant a digital darkroom. I then started to emphasize in the photograph the colors and the shapes that attracted me in the first place, what I remembered from that particular image, and to soften all that was extraneous to those feelings.
So, after working professionally with computers for many years and being an amateur photographer and art lover for many more, I was able to combine my two passions — art and technology — into PixelGraphs photomontages.
