Erwin Taramajesko was born in Florence, Italy at the end of the 1950’s to an Italian-Swiss family. He lived his early years in the historic center and the nearby suburbs of the Tuscan capital. The antique buildings and the various styles of the 1900’s mixed in reality and in his imagination. At the beginning of school age he started to experiment both with drawing and the construction of abstract objects found at home. As well as living in Florence, he spends time in Switzerland and Versilia. His father, from his early years, took him to visit museums and to walk in the most beautiful parts of Florence. Until the end of his adolescence the classical and the antique were his cultural references. During the first years of high school his passion for modelling led him to the use objects, self-constructed and found in various ambient, to create scenes of ‘real-life’ with a particular attention to realism and ‘hyper-realism’. Cheyco Leidmann was his idol for colour that he imitated and who inspired his first images. After enrolling at University, the eagerness of youth and the spirit of adventure led him to a sudden impulse- to enrol in the Foreign Legion- where he remained for a year. In 1980 he returned to Italy in adventurous form and his parents had the problem of sorting out his legal situation seeing that it was prohibited to take military service for a state other than his compulsory obligation and he risked arrest. In the following years he worked for the family firm as well as continuing his experiments and photographic research producing his first photographic works for local advertising firms. 1983 was a decisive year. He abandoned the family firm and University to be exclusively a professional photographer. He started as an assistant to a colleague not much oder than him in a deconsecrated church in the heart of old Florence. In that period he began to read Paris Vogue where the photographs of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdon primarily, but also those of Albert Watson, Jeanloup Sieff and Skrebneski amongst others, fascinated and inspired him. As well as fashion, he worked with still-life, architectural interiors, and commercial catalogues. In 1987, having finished his military service, he bought a photographic studio where he began again his experiments, both with still-life and portraits. He then joined together with other photographers and transferred to a studio with an industrial laboratory. Since 2010, after transferring into a new flat/studio, he has continued at full force his photographic activity.