The different experiences during life shape the character of each person, almost everything that happens mark one way or another for the rest of your days. Each stage reflects an evolution of the previous one and this evolution makes you progress as a person and as a creator.
Somehow, my photographic practice has the necessary importance to sort all those experiences and materialize in the form of images. I was always interested in the image as way of expression, I started painting (watercolor) then made experiments with collages using my own images, but Photography is the perfect medium of expression with which I want to communicate.
My work is divided into series. My attempt with each one is to explore concepts that interest me from my independent and personal approach. I take reality as a source of inspiration but at the end, this things that surrounds me becomes construction and fiction. I am interested in the idea of an image like an empty canvas, adding elements to the scene and create a composition. I also want to control everything and not leave almost nothing to chance. Due to the development of these years, I want my images to be as accurate as possible. Each of the series are about specific topics but I would like to think they all have things in common and are connected in some way, forming a large corpus of images.
Broadly speaking and with few exceptions, my work always revolve around people who appear in them, attempt to grant the status of “characters” like actors in a fictional world were they develop that role. I cannot think about a project within portraits, within people. Let’s say the portraits are almost always the basis of every of my projects.
On the other hand, time is something very recurrent in my practice. I use “time” in a conceptual way to refer to the past, to memories, to something that no longer exists. The way of thinking about the whole corpus of images is almost always the same. I always try to contrast genres, I mixed in the same series still lifes with landscapes, landscapes with portraits, still lifes with portraits and so on, using such a recurring and deliberate form of expression.
I am currently working on a new brand project about Youth, understood as a specific “past life stage”. I was always interested about this stage because of the intensity of this period of the human existence, or at least the intensity with which I lived these particular years. This work has clear autobiographical approach.
From my point of view, a fundamental thing in this stage is music, which is notably present in the pictures. The music, amongst other things, is a thing that people are identified and in some way configurates your personality.
As in other previous work, there is a component of fiction and deliberate construction I play with the idea of rebuild parts of the past with things that we have in the present. So I use and combine two tenses, the past and the present. Once again, the time is very important in that point, I try to relate using different layers of time, the past and present are mixed and interspersed in a more or less free way, trying to create a rhythm like a musical composition.
In this series you can see two types of images: a “direct” image which is what I took from reality (reality understood as physical aspect) and other “digital” image that I take from Internet and mostly they are frames from Youtube videos.
Alberto Feijoo
