Harrogate photographer Ernesto Rogata on the Rome paparazzi, Carabinieri, Henri Cartier-Bresson and the skeleton key

“All of us, of course, put a mask on,” he says. “If we are giving a presentation, if you are talking to our boss, or if you're talking to someone else. Whatever we do, we tend to put on these masks.

"We don't want everything to be exposed, to be there. We want to protect ourselves. And so with photography, you actually try to photograph in between those moments. Just at the specific time where the person is dropping the mask, that's when you want to press the button.”

Regular readers will have seen the work of Ernesto, a veteran photographer who often contributes pictures to The Yorkshire Post.

Although he is settled in Harrogate, having moved to England more than 25 years ago, Ernesto, who turns 60 in October this year, is from Italy and that’s where his photography journey began.

He grew up in Avezzano, a city 700 metres above the sea level in the Abruzzo region. “So close to the ski slopes that we used to bunk school sometimes, catch a bus and catch and go skiing,” says Ernesto.

Harrogate, which he loves, also has a gentler way of life but, he says, “especially as a photographer - as a street photographer and documentary photographer - places with more texture, with more of a rough edge, are so much more interesting”.

That’s understandable, given his past photography assignments. Ernesto got serious about photography in his teens and, using a spare room at home and the photo development equipment his friend had, set up his own dark room. Following in his father’s footsteps, he later left for Rome aged 18 to take up a law degree, and was doing well, but got distracted by his true passion for photography.

At the time, it was possible to walk into news agencies, show your pictures and ask casually for work. “It was a funny time because the polite word is documentary photographers, but the actual word is paparazzi. Especially in Rome, they were paparazzi.”

The word itself comes from Italy - after the character Paparazzo from Federico Fellini's 1960 film La Dolce Vita - but for Ernesto’s purposes it taught him to work quickly and to find angles others might not.

Meanwhile, Italy’s capital was going through turbulent times in the 1970s and 80s. “It was an exciting time in Rome,” says Ernesto. “It was also a very critical and politically unstable time."

He tells of the Anni di piombo (the Years of Lead) when the far-left terrorist group Brigate Rosse (the Red Brigades) operated and even kidnapped and murdered the former Prime Minister, Almo Moro, in 1978.

In 1984, the popular Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer died of a heart attack. Ernesto says: “His funeral in Piazza San Giovanni in Rome, one of the most famous squares, was unbelievable. The square was packed with literally millions of people. So I was there and I was taking pictures for one of the papers. That was what always interested me, that element of documentary photography. Photographing people but in specific circumstances, specific events.”

Ernesto got what he describes as his proper photography job with a studio in Perugia which specialised in fashion and food imagery. However, back then, Italian men were still required to do compulsory military service for a year.

“I used my photography to get into the Carabinieri, which is basically a branch of the police. But with my photography skills, I was able to get into the forensic department and into crime investigation. So sometimes I was used to photograph drug deals, you know, hidden behind a curtain or something.”

As part of the forensics team, there were also post-mortem examinations which needed to be photographed.

“It just gave me this completely new perspective on photography,” says Ernesto. “People joke that I became a vegetarian when I was doing all the post-mortems.”

When he finished military service it coincided with a recession in Italy and, still in his 20s, Ernesto decided to retrain as a cameraman at a time when there was a big demand for video, then became a video editor.

Through friends, in 1999 he was able to get a job in London with Sky, where he still works, now splitting his time between the capital and Harrogate. He settled in North Yorkshire with his wife, Kate, after they met sitting next to each other on a plane returning from Italy, when she had been split up from her friends.

For a while, his photography took a back seat. That was until in 2007 he saw the exhibition Henri Cartier-Bresson's Scrapbook: Photographs 1932–1946, at what is now the Bradford Science and Media Museum, and his regard for one of the art form’s greatest names rekindled his passion. “Looking at those images, something clicked,” he says.

Ever since, he has been working on his photography again, shooting mainly in the genres of street, documentary and music, attending all kinds of events with his Nikon D800 or D810 digital SLR. As a cancer survivor, he also has a special interest in photographing health stories.

Ernesto also hosts his own workshops under The Curious Eye, and tells those who attend that if they have £100, it’s better to spend it on the books of photography masters than fancy new equipment.

"You need to be able to say something with your images,” he says. “In the same way that to make an interesting conversation, you need to be able to say something with your words. There are styles and grammar and syntax. So you have your own style and your own ways of conveying a certain message.”

One of his favourites of his own pictures is a photo of Liam Gallagher in concert, looking straight into his lens. Another was taken after a frustrating day in London, when having not caught any shots to his liking, he looked up in a gallery cafe to see two identical twins dressed the same, each writing ambidextrously with both of their hands, tackling a newspaper game, with a woman asleep behind them.

Perhaps his favourite part of photography, though, is the privilege of learning about his subjects.

"The camera becomes this skeleton key that opens people's lives, people's stories, to you. That's the whole idea.”

For information about workshops, follow Ernesto’s Instagram page @the_curious_eye_works or visit ernestorogata.com/workshops