BY STEVE BISSON
1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?
My interest about photography started when I realized that it could be possible to take pictures with an aim beyond the aesthetic. Particularly I remember a series that was taken in the abandoned home of my father’s uncle. This was the first time I worked with a group of images about the same subject. These black and white pictures with a simple composition were developed in my precarious first laboratory.
2.How did your research evolve with respect to those early day?
These early days were mainly concerned with experimentation and learning and in this respect little has changed. I continue learning and trying to retain the curiosity of those days.
What has changed is my interest about certain topics, which are related with my life experience. Through time I have worked at defining a photographic language that allows me to recognize myself as the author.
3. You have studied at Visual Arts Academy Martín A. Malharro, Mar del Plata, Argentina. How this experience influenced your career as photographer? Any professor or special course in your memories?
Studying in the Visual Arts Academy Martín A. Malharro was an outstanding experience. I would highlight how enriching the opportunity was to be exposed to, besides photography, other expressive media such as painting, etching, drawing and sculpture. I remember two professors with very different personal works who have become part of me or at least I like to believe that each image I take contains something from them. Pepe Fernandez Balado who worked mainly with B&W photography and was able to communicate great emotions throughout small details in excellent prints developed in his own laboratory, and Raul La Cava who expresses himself with a ironic and casual style by means of a color series and introduced me to contemporary photography.
4. You now live and work in Berlin. How this shift has affected your photography and your personal research?
I always had a lot of curiosity and interest to subjects related to contemporary history, art history, sociology, anthropology, urbanism, geography, etc… I have been always interested in the immediate environment with that I interact and which influences my photography but mainly my life. I left my country of origin 14 years ago and although the relationship with the cities I have lived in have not defined the topics directly that interest me as an author,they certainly have influenced them. In general, I try to know the cities where I live through photography, with the aim to understand the environment as a place to inhabit in the best way.
What has influenced mostly my work in Berlin, was the unknown and unfamiliar city structure that I tried to assimilate and where big natural spaces are mixed with extreme monotonous blocks of buildings. This mixture offers spaces where the impersonal and the authentic, the foreseeable and the disturbing are experienced at the same time.
5. You work explores cities as a reflection space that refers to the contemporary citizen and their relationship with the environment. Tell us about the project ‘No man’s land’. How did you feel about this space and its history?
'No man’s land' Project is focused on the portion of land right next to the Wall dividing Berlin for nearly three decades. This piece of land was converted to an exclusive military zone. Currently these spaces seem like ordinary places but they have a special emotional charge that is directly linked to recent European history. Personally it was a strange experience. On one hand this emotional charge motivated me at a conceptual and aesthetic level to develop the project. On the other, I could not help but feel a great unease about the existence of other walls at present which are evidence of a collective failure reminding us ofwhat we still have to learn.
6. Nature or better relations with it within the city is a central topic in your photographic research. How should photography be used to improve town planning and to build more liveable cities?
I’m not sure how photography could be used to improve the cities at least in a direct way. I believe that photography due to its own characteristics, allows us to have an excellent perspective from which to reflect upon how we build our homes as part of society. It is said that we are what we build. Through photography we can better understand how we are. Perhaps, from this starting point we could continue the wise choices and never repeat the mistakes.
7. The projects ‘Inhabit Fedora’ has been selected for the new edition of the exhibition “Naturae” which is centered on the experience of space, especially through nature. Tell us about how the photographic medium is involved in the perception of space, or rather in its awareness?
Photography as medium always offers an arbitrary summary, a small piece of something wider. This summary is immediately assimilated and understood in a natural way by the viewers who link it with their own experiences. Therefore, I believe that we become aware of space in a reflexive manner since the photographic medium suggests much more than it shows.
8. Three books of photography that you recommend in relation to the experience of space.
I would like to cite three recent books: ’Almost There’ by Aleix Plademunt; ’Ostalgia’ by Simona Rota; ’Pearl’ by Tiago Casanova.
9. Projects that you are working on and plans for the future?
Nowadays I am finishing the edition of my first photography book about my last project ‘Sometimes We Have No Shadow’ thanks to the Folio Award received last May in the Photo Art Barcelona Festival. We are working to present it next October along with an exhibition in The Folio Club, Barcelona. In parallel, I began to take photographic notes about different subjects that I would like to develop in the near future.