From the Beginning

Last May I had the opportunity to travel to Beijing thanks to the exhibition “The Via Combusta” held at Three Shadows Photography Art Center where I participated with photographs of my project Dream Moons. After many years focused on photography, transforming my most everyday environment, and dedicating myself to a photography quite far from the documentary, I decided to retake my old small compact camera with me to go back to street photography during my free time in the city. With no other intention than to reconnect with my beginnings, when, like almost all photographers, I was photographing the streets of my city.

I remember one of the first photographs I took in Barcelona, it was 2005 more or less, in the Raval neighborhood. I wanted to portray a girl who was playing in front of her house. When I asked her if I could take a portrait, she replied: “You the photographers are all liars…”, but finally she let me take the picture. That phrase that remained engraved in my head until today, has made sense over the years.

A few years later, photographing a report on homeless people, I began to realize the meaning of that phrase. I was using a dramatic aesthetic, with contrasted black and white retouching and trying to make those people seem more alone and lost than perhaps they were. When I learned about their stories, I realized that yes, some of those people had a very dramatic life, but I also realized that many of them lived that way because they had chosen to.

From here on, my works have become more personal, subjective, and I think at the same time more universal. It's hard for me to try to talk about the lives of others without feeling like I'm failing. Trying to be reasonable is complicated when there are so many different realities and so many different points of view on the same subject.

In the photographs I took in Beijing, I didn't want to talk about anything in particular, I just let myself be carried away by the subconscious and aesthetics. Do you see some kind of message in this series of pictures, do you think they explain some reality?

Yurian Quintanas Nobel is part of Der Greif X Grisebach: “New Positions”.

Check out his Artist Feature The Ignorant Gardener.