Arton Sefa, was born in 1987 in Kosovo’s capital city Prishtina and immigrated to Germany in 1998 at the age of ten, fleeing from war in his home country.

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In early years he had shown interest in technology and mechanics, especially that one of cameras. Always wanting to find out how they work and fixing them. At that point creating something, doing arts, still seemed to be very far from what he did. Photography happened to him more or less by coincidence, being offered an apprenticeship for being a photographer in a small town in Bavaria – which soon became too small for his ideas.

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Moving to Munich made it possible for him to work together with other artists in the sphere of fashion photography, that’s where he first got in touch with people “creating” fashion and all those involved in the process. There he met various mannequins and fashion and hair stylists, designers. Some of them became friends, with whom he still works together, supporting and inspiring each other to make ideas possible for the sake of fashion – for the sake of arts.

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Soon he started travelling around from fashion week to fashion week, from Milano to Paris, New York and London, being more impressed from what happens behind the scenes – backstage – than on the catwalk, catching wonderful and transient moments of the few minutes before the show starts – right in the spirit of Susan Sontag who says: “to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” (On Photography, 1977).

 

And that is what he does. Participating in the process, wandering around like a shadow behind the scenes, to catch a glimpse of the beauty created for the stage. In this way he, for example, many times had the chance to work together with hair stylist Eugene Souleimani and also get to know the work of Yohji Yamamoto, Masion Margiela, Vivienne Westwood or Stella McCartney, as well as Jil Sander, ACNE, Chloe.

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Besides the backstage photography, he loves creating stories for magazines, bringing together creative and talented designers and stylists with inspiring mannequins, always knowing, that a story is told by many.

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The stories where published in magazines such as Vogue, GQ, ICON, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, L’officiel, Schön!.

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Besides his permanent residence in New York and Munich, Arton works and stays in different fashion capitals in Europe.