Alfonso Almendros
Spain
Family Reflections
Family Reflections
I do not have any memory of my childhood in which my father would appear. Somehow I always considered his death, when I was two, as a fundamental event in my life. I have always wanted to understand some passages of the past that I never experienced myself. In our old family pictures, almost everything seems distant. These images symbolise my memories – unknown and familiar at the same time.
In Family Reflections, I take pictures of myself in places vaguely reminding those that I have seen in our family photographs. At the same time, each of these images defines one basic concept of our ideology – the roots, virility as a symbol of authority, glorification of maternity, obsession with death, or the sacred character of some objects.
Solitude turns into a paradox when it is shared. Words get dissolved – incomplete, fragile… slightly dark, almost invisible. A minuscule thread that links me with my relatives and makes me search for something that could explain why we are so similar in our intimacy.
Alfonso Almendros
Alfonso Almendros is a Spanish photographer and graduated in History of Art at Universitat de Valencia and Artistic Photography at E.A.S.D. Valencia. His work has been selected for several international competitions including Photographic Museum Of Humanity 2014 Grant (Italy), the III Convocatoria OCEMX de Fotografía, (Mexico), Emergentes DST (Portugal), Voies Off Prize 2012 (France), the Gran Prix 2011 (Poland) or the II Prize U.C.L.M. (Spain).
His work has also been exhibited in several international festivals, centres and galleries around the world including King Juan Carlos I Center of New York, the Quad Gallery in Derby (UK), the Centro Cultural de España in México, India Art Fair 2013 in New Delhi, Festival Voies Off 2012 in Arles (France), Estampa 2012 and 2011 in Madrid (Spain) or the 10th International Festival of Photography in Lodz (Poland).
He is currently living and working as a freelancer photographer in Helsinki.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My photographic works are often characterized by an autobiographical component. I have been always interested in certain incidents and persons belonging to the past that somehow had influenced in the course of my life. Mostly they are elements that I feel familiar with but at the same time very distant from, like weak shades in my memories and vague episodes of a time that I am not able to remember.
I feel attacked about the capacity of suggestion that can be extracted from an event or person of the past and how this last one can imply a sense of research or tracking down something. I like to use these imprecise episodes that evoke an indefinable distance as a starting point in my projects.
Metaphors and symbologies are vital elements in my pictures. I like to take the objects and incidents out of context as a means to create a symbolical language where dark and vague ideas become quietly noticeable. After we stop a moment of the movement of the objective reality, the daily thing acquires a mysticism loaded of questions with different answers. Photography becomes a kind of conspiratorial wink that the observer must interpret in an intuitive way.
