NEW YORK, NY.- What began completely by chance has evolved into the body of photographic work that is
Marina Sersale’s Liminal Space. Made as she wanders her native city of Rome, Italy, the result is a series of dramatic black and white images of people, sights and scenes; a personal document of the world around her.
The book brings together over a decade of work captured in the streets of her hometown Rome and the countries she has visited: a visual exploration of the spaces between light and shadow, reality and imagination.
For Sersale, photography is both a way of perceiving everyday life and a means of engaging with it. Since returning to photography in 2012, her lens has captured fleeting moments of human life - ordinary but charged with subtle intensity and intimacy. Lovers, children and passers-by move through timeless urban and coastal landscapes, evoking a feeling that is both familiar and enigmatic.
The images feature Rome and Positano, Venice, New York and other cities, creating suspended scenes where reality seems on pause. Light and shadow interact to isolate moments, transforming the ordinary into experiences that feel almost separate from time itself.
Liminal Space is a meditation on human presence and transience, a study of thresholds where connection and distance coexist. Sersale’s photography invites the viewer to pause, to dwell on the in-between, and to experience a world both intimate and fleeting. Her photography, much like her work in artistic perfumery, also her profession, demonstrates a deep sensitivity to detail and the subtle interplay between perception and memory, resonating with both beauty and mystery.
She says, “Images have always interested me: I grew up in Rome where aesthetic beauty is the norm and I think that was one of the reasons why in my twenties I wanted to become a photographer. My life though, took a different path and I became a documentary film-maker, and then, in another twist, I began creating fragrances, which is my present profession. Throughout all this my love for images - photography in particular - stayed with me.
She adds, “This body of work explores the threshold between reality and perception: I am drawn to moments in which the familiar becomes uncertain, where the boundary between what is seen and what is imagined begins to blur, and a fleeting sense of intimacy between myself and my subject emerges”
EVENT
The exhibition Liminal Space – featuring a selection of photographs from the photobook of the same name – will be held at EDDart, an art gallery located at Palazzo Taverna, Via di Monte Giordano 36, Rome, from 17 June to 17 July 2026.
Book details:
Hardback clothbound cover with foil deboss
96 pages, 240 x 306mm (portrait)
£45/ €50 / $60
ISBN 978-1-80598-024-7
Marina Sersale, born and raised in the heart of Rome, has long nurtured an intimate and enduring dialogue with the visual arts. A former documentary filmmaker, she returned to photography in late 2012, marking the beginning of a deeply personal and continually evolving artistic journey.
With over two decades devoted to artistic perfumery, Sersale co-founded in 2004, alongside her husband Sebastián Alvarez Murena, the acclaimed fragrance house Eau d’Italie Le Sirenuse Positano.
This same sensibility permeates Sersale’s photographic language. Her gaze - attentive, instinctive - lingers on the ephemeral, where light and atmosphere become carriers of meaning. Each image emerges as a quiet distillation of experience, translating fragments of the past into moments suspended in time, charged with a subtle, resonant intensity.
Her work was first presented in November 2015 as part of the group exhibition Chance Encounters, curated by Hikari Creative at N.6 Gallery in Tehran. In March 2016, she held her first solo exhibition at ILEX Gallery in Rome, followed by further solo and group exhibitions worldwide.
