Román Yñán
Barcelona
1976
“Hello, my name is Román and I take pictures of my family.” Familiar, adj. referred to family. Homely and not ceremonial treatment. Simple and ordinary word, language, style, etc. Something you knowwell or do easily. Someone close. Since I started taking pictures I’ve learned that it’s in an adaptive system where I feel most comfortable, photographically speaking. I adapt photography to my life. After shooting many, many pictures, I realized that in documenting my private life, my diaries were the strongest and most repeated thing in my work. I take pictures because I need it, but I’m not sure if it’s a creative need.
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)
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