At the moment I’m traveling around Spain on a new project I’m doing with the same team I did ‘Mírame, Lima’, when I went to the bathroom of my hotel room in Valencia, I turned the light on and it came this red light. Then I realised that the light was a heating light as I felt the warm straight away. I liked the effect of the colour and the round mirror multiplying the image, so I went for the selfie.
I’ve been taking pictures for many years. I’ve done everything from photojournalism and stills, to fashion and portraiture. Nowadays I’m focused in Fine Arts.
While studying architecture in the 80’s in my hometown, Lima, I got a job as a journalist for a local newspaper. Many of the articles had to be documented with photographs, this made me take a camera and start to do my first pictures.
What do you enjoy most about image making?
I enjoy the whole process, how an early idea develops and takes shape and then goes real, and later on enhanced in postproduction. Once digital photography appeared in the market it added excitement to the finishing process.
At the moment I’m working in two different projects. I’ve just mentioned one before which is about the evolution of modern Spain over the last 40 years. I’ll be traveling throughout the country till June 2017. The other project which I’m working on with art director David Tortora, deals with blindness and visual impairment.
What are the challenges you face, and how do you overcome them?
I think the big challenge today is that since mobile phones have cameras the whole world has become photographers. In theory this would makes it harder to stand out. We now produce massive quantities of photographs where in most of the cases, quality has become extremely poor, therefore exist a path to stand out.
Sometimes I feel I’m maximalist, others minimalist, some other times I’m quite convinced that I’m sophisticated, even exuberant or sober, but maybe I’m just quite trash. Eclectic they call it.
I listen a lot to the radio, so its always different, but from time to time I always like to go back to my classics, Roisin Murphy, Tracey Thorne, Goldfrapp, Jimmy Sommerville and Donna Summer.
Many, just to mention a few, Guy Bourdin, Melvin Sokolsky, Diane Arbus, William Klein, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Jerome Bosch, Gustav Klimt.
Art is to think, to develop. Art is always in the process, always becoming. Art is introspection. Art is the process where fantasy becomes reality. It shows the direction where the world goes.
Most of my work is the product of my free time. I enjoy to research, to try, to challenge myself. That makes me free in my free time.