Collecting and putting these photographs together in a more stable platform can help to reflect upon the representation and visibility of migrants in contemporary Spanish society. It is precisely in that process of appropriation that I have cropped out the customs and police badges to focus attention on the experience these men and women have just gone through.

About roads and landscapes. Cosmology of recognizable and new elements. Roads are shown as new metaphors, as new grounds to conquer. In this ontological research of “way”, I’m interested in the idea of way as “origin”. An element that guides and avoid to go adrift, but we can only control one part of it, its end is always unpredictable. The road shows what is going to be, or what hasn’t still become. It’s a mystery in itself. Like this, path as humans fundamental “ignorance” has a deep symbolic meaning, we all seek to know and also to dream about what isn’t known. Another key idea is the road as a “means” for men to go through the nature. Way of domination of landscape, piercing and cutting it. Men, as a microcosm, need to create artificial pathways to allow them to move through the natural world. Faced with a powerful nature, the human being needs a shelter; they need the artificial to catch the natural.

“Chrystelle”, Canal’s video is set against the striking natural landscape of his native Santander, his main character’s slick, vivid costuming surprisingly resonant with the vibrant elemental surroundings. At once alien and native, much like the artist himself, his work mimics life and his life is his work.

He puts it best himself: “I like to create a new reality that remains connected with my life. I like opening doors onto the unknown and building something new.”


(Stina Puotinen, january 2013)

For me photography is a way of relating with my loved ones. It’s like that, I can’t help it. I think that I’ve reached the point where photography can’t be separated from my life, neither my life from photography. This is what my work is about, if it can be called a work.

The most ordinary and common is what makes us alike; after all, the private lives of people are very similar, we all seek more or less the same things and maybe my work with the diaries and the familiar series searches for this, normality. A mirror that reflects normal normality, where I share with you what makes us similar not different. But I’m aware that one thing is to work on this and another is to expose oneself. To share this normality is not so easy or normal.


Relation: connection between two things.
Relations: connection between two or more things.


“Intimacy” or “privacy” means different things depending on the cultures and individuals. “intimacy” is to keep the subject and his actions away from the rest of the human race, but it also refers to the feature of a place that invites to this state of the human race. “intimacy” is sometimes related with anonymity even if it is something specially appreciated by well known people. “intimacy” can also be understood as an aspect of security, where the balance between the interests of two groups can be highlighted. (source: Wikipedia)



























































“Familiar Series” presents a series of photographies which Román Yñán has made about his daily life with his wife Sonia, and his chidren, Tomás and Elsa. Through the example of his own family, Román suggests a photographic research about the family in a universal sense, which is something that we all recognize and experience in one way or another.

Román Yñán, brings to the field of artistic photography a kind of image which is very close to the so called amateur photography, because taking pictures of our loved ones is something everyone does in a very spontaneous way. The photographer also adds a conceptual work and a very clear exploratory intention. He does this with his wife´s complicity and with his medium format camara, which gives a very meditated and cared character to the images.

The camera is a full member of the family, going unnoticed most of the time or inviting the other members to participate in an amusing familiar theater. He observes his family through the camera, in some ocations from an ironic distance, the one from which someone would take, that observes the family from far away, and in other ocassions getting very close to the most intimate sphere of his daily life.

(Text by Ana Schulz)

Albert Gusi – Castellbisbal (Barcelona), 1970


“Walk in circle” is a project that proposes mini itineraries that go nowhere. A little walk that takes us to nowhere in particular, leaving only a trace of itself, making the itinerary more evident each time. Caminar en rodó is the ideal way to see a landscape in all it’s dimensions, roaming around in circles allows space for complete and expansive contemplation of the surroundings.

The project is an intervention of the landscape, reproduce on a photograph taken by the Google satellites (therefor being a post-frame in times of post-photography), which creates an artistic experience that can be shared and experienced by anyone.

(Routes can be downloaded by clicking on the images.)

(…) but the circular paths of Gusi are purposeful, intentional and with them come a challenge to the absurdity of walking in circles, without reason or destination. With the sole purpose of leaving a mark on the earth that can be read by GPS from Wikiloc or whatever other platform capable of taking satellite pictures. This is an ultra modern intervention on a landscape that only gets documented by satellite imagery.

(…) if one thinks that creative photography makes reference to a particular creator, in the act of patenting their authority and confirming that a decision was effectively made by someone, and that behind this someone is a discourse, a poetry, a particular proposal. The work of Guis goes beyond this. The frames are pictures without an author, and the absurd circular walk documents the fact that a satellite image has no author. Can it then continue to be photograph? Or is it just that it illustrates this presence of absence? If this instantaneous is always a false promise, even for a few seconds, is that not always the characteristic of any type of image?


(Extracts from a text by Lucy Quesada. Complete text, in spanish, can be found here)

My research made me obsessively reconstruct their lives. With the techniques of an inexperienced detective, but with an infinite willpower, from small unconnected clues I filled in the impossible gaps their images left. The odyssey of these years living other people’s lives put me in contact with human misery, how unable we are of bearing our lightness and, overall, I suffered the wounds of those who, driven by ambition, betray friendship to achieve fame.

Pictures were taken between 2010 and 2012

I arrived at Los Barros with the idea of undertaking my project in the context of a dynamic family life. I came holding on to the memories of my childhood: the house in the summer, the barbecues, the swimming-pool, the walks. The reality which I found was very different. The kids are no longer kids, the parents are busy working and we no longer spend time in the countryside. Family as a structure is a myth, and like any myth, it has fallen. Love and family-union remains, but it’s stage is no longer Los Barros. I have experienced a disenchantment with the estate, in it, I have felt an emotional abandonment. Alone, in search of the trails of a war, I stumbled upon dozens of rabbit lairs, I came across unexpected images, accidental ones. Nature elapses and obscures the landscape’s history, change arrives and oblivion defies with serenity.

My grandfather passed away at the end of the summer. A few weeks before, we spent some time together at Los Barros. I photographed him next to my grandmother in an August sun-set. Not knowing it at the time, he was saying his good-byes to the countryside and I was saying my good-byes to him. My grandfather was a backbone in my family, now I feel and take on the responsibility of making his memory live on.

Under the threatening Castilian sun of the month of July, soldiers remained hopeful. A soldier is a professional optimist. And I – like any narrator – am also an optimist, with the hope that my history will be repeated and that it’s tale will be told, I have hope that the myth will rise… My children will play between oak trees and trenches, we will sweat in the sound of the cicadas and we will eat spit-roasted rabbit with thyme, like the soldiers would have done in 1936.


Javier Marquerie Thomas (2012)

Individuals who live in harmony and in close contact with nature, with the intention of being able to develop social systems where there is no growing anonymity. Their personal convictions took them to live in an alternative way, far from the urban areas in a completely ecological style.

Is it your Dream? Establishes a relationship between the subjects and their habitats, which in turn represent an extension of their lifestyle, and suggests a different way of thinking and living. I am especially interested in the relationship between people and their homes and the way in which they adapt to the environment in order to be able to ally with it.

For the making of this project, the main feature which attracted my attention was the complex relationship among the children and youth with the environment. A sad way of life, with a youthful angst caused by the relative isolation in contrast to the personal satisfaction that their lifestyle entails.

It´s a series intervening on the unfinished constructions’ frameworks and that have become a sort of contemporary ruins; the idea is to revitalize the space by creating a new reality inside the building. These interventions are carried out with the abandoned buildings’ own wood and are painted with bright shades, which are characteristic of the construction.

Departing from the need to find a path that leads to a personal and artistic search in my immediate surroundings. This search ought to allow me to penetrate the different layers of meaning of construction, be it human (society, politics) or tangible. Construction, understood as the transformation of natural surroundings, unites and acts as a canvas to develop all these variables through different structures and materials that are used-or reflected upon- in the work.