Hello! My name is Niko Calabrese, and I am currently studying civil engineering at Purdue University.
I am so glad that you chose to explore my portfolio! I take a generalist yet intellectual perspective to my work, and I am grateful and eager to share it with you.
While I have the most experience in digital photography (ca. 2018), I began writing poetry in October of 2024.
My insight comes from spending time in nature and prayer, sowing the fruits of my relationships, remaining ever curious of how the world works, and questioning how I can give more of my optimism and wisdom to those around me.
The Origin of NCP and My Work
When the COVID-19 pandemic first reached everyday life, I was a sophomore in high school. After my high school announced that we would not be returning in-person after spring break of 2020, my family and I traveled to our condo in St. Petersburg, Florida, where I first started N. Calabrese Photography. At that point in my life, I had been taking pictures for roughly 2 years. I began by developing an online portfolio to exhibit and share my work with friends and family. Then, I began advertising myself as a photographer-for-hire, where I photographed high school seniors and sports in my local community. I began drafting my own contracts, where I spoke to other photographers and specialists in legal jargon to ensure a productive release of liability. This curiosity snowballed into exploring every possible avenue of owning and starting a business, including business cards, artistic expression, social media and advertising, branding, product development, client engagement and communication, historical and logistical organization, accounting, and corporate recognition. In my first 5 years of “owning” a business, I am confident to say that I love being active in every part of the business, which helps me stay humble and engaged with my supporters.
Even though I have always been the only employee of N. Calabrese Photography, this organization would not be what it is without my friends and family to help and guide me along the way. I believe a stable and trustworthy support system is the key to accomplishing any good thing, and I have received nothing but the best from everybody who has interacted with my work, so THANK YOU for making NCP what it is today! Another integral part of creating art is the spirit of dissent and continual learning. Without questioning the natural order, there would be no innovation. And without the ability to stay open-minded to new ideas, there would be no yielding to novelty or opportunity. This relationship between advisor and advised or creator and audience is what helps me create the most effective and representative products possible. Above all, as a Catholic, my faith in Jesus Christ and the Blessed Trinity is the font from which all my motivation, perspective, and art flows. You’ll find that in almost all of my work, I acknowledge and speak on behalf of Christ in the spirit of His life, Work, divinity, or heavenly angels and saints. Also, I enjoy speaking on the secular or human experience in my work, which is especially evident in my exploration of emotion and photographic framing. More popularly, my work draws ideas from the children’s book series Frog & Toad, the impressionist Claude Monet, and the music I listen to like James Taylor, Watchhouse, and Chatham Rabbits. You might be able to spot some song lyrics in a few of my poems, like “The Long Way Home.”
The Vision of NCP
In the spirit of embracing the uncertainty and unguided motivation of the COVID-19 era, I decided to pursue the ambitious goal of refining my photography hobby into something more official and wide-reaching, while maintaining the exploratory and compassionate personal philosophy I had adopted at that point in life. Since the beginning, I have prided myself in developing work that uplifts the spirit of humanity by being a self-appointed representative of the deep-seated emotions and characters of all motivated and critical thinkers, like myself. I seek to explore, articulate, and display humanity’s most difficult, emotional, and universal truths by using color, pattern, form, imagery, and metaphor to point to greater purpose and truth that is sometimes unintelligible or misunderstood by the monotony of daily life. Today, this vision has remained unchanged, only adapted into the mediums of poetry, narrative, and the visual arts previously ignored.
July 2025