About

Bastard Artist Los Angeles.

Marco Romano Bhimani (aka Bastard Artist) is a Los Angeles based fine-art photographer, known locally for his stylized portrait work with LA’s underground hip-hop artists, punks, graffiti writers, gang-bangers, street racers, and all the disassociated dissidents aimlessly meandering through the undercurrents of LA’s urbanized shrouded street. Marco began shooting video and documentary portraiture over 15 years ago and hasn’t stopped since. He has aimed his artistic sights to a revealing and unflinching glance of the gritty rawness of uninhibited flesh, pushing the protruding lens into the subversive while riding the fine line between art and misanthropy.

Background:

Marco Romano Bhimani was born in South Pasadena (1978); he was a kid that loved skateboarding and ice cream. His mother abandoned him at age nine and he had little communication with his father. Until the age of eighteen, he grew up in a multitude of group homes, halfway houses and respites. He was defiant; running away often, he found a home in the street. Venturing into the unknown, cutting class, stealing disposable cameras to capture what he saw. As a young man, jobless, these cameras were easily accessible.

Marco was drawn to trash and filth, alley-ways full of graffiti, a lack of police presence in neighborhoods over-run with drugs and gangs. He dabbled with digital imaging for a brief instant. He then became very passionate about photography and knew digital was not for him. Knowing this, he wanted to teach himself traditional photo making because he needed to preserve his art in the purest form.

Marco is a high-school graduate and a self taught photographer. His projects include My Los Angeles and The Green Wall Series, amongst many other bodies of work and collections. He is producing a documentary called FILM over FOOD encompassing his life and struggles.