álvaro pérez mulas
Tu presencia y tu ausencia sombra son una de otra, sombras me dan y quitan
Your presence and your absence is one of the other shadows, shadows that give me and removed
Omens. 1923
Pedro Salinas
I started this series in 2002, after a very difficult personal moment, when I took refuge in a selection of readings with which I sought to connect with how I felt.
These readings served as a trigger for me to transfer those sensations into images that I used to exorcise many of the emotions produced by the situations I was going through.
After that first stage, once I got over the hardest period, I have continued with the series, which will accompany me sine die, because it forms part of my way of seeing the world, it defines me.
From a formal point of view, my artistic training was at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Salamanca. There I discovered the possibilities of photography as a creative medium. Surprisingly, the teacher was not an artist, but a photojournalist.
This intertwining between two apparently different fields of creation has marked my way of working. Photojournalism is based on the refusal to alter reality when taking a photograph, because it must attest to what it is wanted to communicate. Art transforms reality to communicate what each artist wants to manifest.
My hybrid education, a product of this intertwining of photojournalism and art, has marked my approach to photography. In this series I work by taking visual notes of reality to bring them to my own territory. Thus, the images are captured anywhere, at any time, and the where and when doesn't matter, but what I can express through them.
I don't manipulate or prepare what I show in my images, at least not from a formal point of view. But I do take advantage of the technical possibilities at the time of shooting, I decontextualise them and present them with a different intention. So, in a more open sense, I do end up manipulating them, transforming their meaning to suit my intention.