What is it that you already love to make?
I appreciate taking photographs of my own concepts as well as just documenting moments in society, or portraying them. I have never thought myself as a commercial photographer but lately I have encountered a passion to do small shoots or promos for small businesses, by putting myself out there it nourishes me and I get to enjoy experimenting with different mediums with my photographs as I expand my knowledge.
What do you wish you could do with more confidence?
I wish I could stop rushing as much to actually achieve a more successful outcome when I try to create something. Just take it more slow and actually think the process calmly. Most of the time I feel like I am rushing and do not give enough time for something to come together naturally, so I tend to mess up the whole piece and still appreciate it for what it is. I would like to see a different result.
What processes scare you? How do you set about starting your own work?
Editing motion pictures because of how I struggle seeing things moving since I am so used to making still photography. Every time I come to try a new way of processing photography I fear that I am going to mess up all the prints, etc. But also by learning it one realizes the level of experimentation one can get to.
What inspires you?
Having a new concept and gathering the sufficient sources I need to bring it to life, the trial and fail part of any process inspires me because I can also create something else I have not even think about, that makes it a more a real creative process at least to me. When I start a project I am usually excited but it is something that has to end somehow, I have noticed I do not like to just do one thing for some of pieces and I create multiple different ones from a same image.
What does your art say to an audience?
My work is intimate yet confrontational, it draws people with deeply personal imagery but leaves them reflecting on broader, often uncomfortable truths about freedom, loss and reinvention.
Watch carefully and with attention and think about your own work.
Time as a layered experience, intimacy and unfiltered reality, the body as a storyteller, emotional environments, freedom and its complexities. Wether is staged or documented I always try to aim to telling a story about something real that us humans share in any way. Using sexuality, emotions and life experiences as subjects by also bringing a different subject to impersonate this experience. It is interesting to see an outcome of something that has maybe not even happened yet.
1-Who are the 5+ artists you chose?
- Robert Mapplethorpe
- Sally Mann
- Cindy Sherman
-Florian Maier-achen
- Nan Goldin
2-What were 5+ themes the artists addressed about making work?
1. Mapplethorpe understood the magic of photography in the sense that sometimes the eye sees something that the brain its still processing, the things that happen that one does not know why they are happening but at the same time understanding that it is right, more as trusting one selves.
2. Sally Mann shows the discipline it takes to be an artist, and the commitment it takes to process one image and expose it right. Any photographer that does large format photography has a different kind of mindset, one step can go wrong and the whole image is for sure going wrong as well.
3. From Cindy Sherman I appreciate and admire the commitment to characters, becoming someone else within yourself for the camera. It is as if it was different self portrait every different but with a new personality or persona. It takes a lot of imagination to build a character and bring it to life.
4. He mentioned abstraction, representation define his landscapes and how important understanding culture can be. Maier-Achen uses a lot of scribble based on landmarks and satellite information. He starts the scribble from the same land he shoots.
5. Nan Goldin is so personal and intimate, her queer identity, addiction, self destruction make her work unique and raw. The level of documentation based on real life experiences one sometimes does not want to experience. Lost is one of the main themes I see in her work.
3-What were 5+ challenges the artists faced in making their work?
1. Faced intensed censorship over the explicit nature of his work, lost funding due to political backlash, dealt with homophobia, his work was often misinterpreted overshadowing his contributions to portraiture and still life photography, AIDS.
2. Struggled with accusations of exploitation and child pornography for photographing her children nude, encountered gender bias in the art world, as her work was often viewed through a moral rather than artistic lens.
3. Encountered criticism of constantly reinventing herself while maintaining relevance in the art world.
4. The fact that he is using a 8x10 Large format camera is risky enough because so many things can go wrong if he missed one step. When it comes to the film images, it is all up to the camera, operator and processing the roll.
5. Struggled with drug addiction and personal trauma, censorship and pushback due to the raw, intimate nature of her photographs, lost many friends to the AIDS crisis.
4-What were 5+ inspirations you drew from the artists?
From Mapplethorpe I admire his controversy style of doing things, it takes a lot for someone to get there and realize is natural human nature to do these things he was displaying. Sally Mann and Nan Goldin highlight themes of identity, transformation, and societal roles. A combination of staged photography and documenting real-life transformation. Florian Maier-Achen manipulated landscapes and Sally Mann's southern landscapes evoke nostalgia and mistery. All artist share a cinematic way of composing these images.
5-What were 5+ things you would like to incorporate into your own work after watching these videos?
Diaristic storytelling, staged identity and transformation. Emotive use of light and landscape. Raw and unfiltered images.
Surreal or manipulated realities. As I read the list it makes me realize how I already incorporate some of these things in my work already and that is the reason why I admire these artists because of the relation I have been building throughout the years and also the ones I keep learning from.
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