Founded in 2005, NOPHOTO is a contemporary photography collective that aims to make UNCONVENTIONAL individual and collective projects viable. The collective is characterized by its open content, an interdisciplinary thread in its forms, the use of multiple supports such as web and digital projections when distributing projects, and the personal involvement of its members throughout the creative and production processes.
NOPHOTO makes negation its starting point. NOPHOTO is not an agency of photographers, but an ATTITUDE; a way of seeing, a revolution. A ‘NO’ (where there’s never enough). This aesthetic attitude makes NOPHOTO not to refuse any kind of creation or exhibition. All work done by the collective offer an experienced view of the everyday, which always leads to the extraordinary. This process is the result of group reflection and interaction among alternative creative processes.
“It’s not that we like to take the opposing view; it’s that we enjoy walking slowly, clumsily, observing minute differences between things, discovering their rhythms. Trying to describe an object, turn it on its head, comb its surroundings and cover the entire perimeter. Asking ourselves what it’s made of and what role it plays in the story. Demanding from ourselves to wear the subject out and still not saying anything. Demanding from ourselves to look closely and yet not resolving anything. Not to illustrate, define or take photographs. We like to un-photograph things and un-name them.”
NOPHOTO was awarded the Revelación Award 2006 by the PHotoEspaña International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts.
THIS IS SPAIN, granted by last FotoPress “La Caixa” first call
THIS IS SPAIN is an ambitious project NOPHOTO wants to carry on in six months. Photographers from the collective aim to register social, cultural, political and geographical aspects of our country and its situation in the European contemporary framework, publishing an essay according to guidelines governing touristic travel guides.
The essay will include photography, text, video and audio (the usual composition of NOPHOTO’s collective projects). It will try to bring to life some ideas on ideological and conceptual narrative of an agreed story. It will reflect on concepts such as: “representation”, “representative”, “stereotype”, “identity” and “story”. All these intended to explore the agreement, or the lack of agreement, between map and territory, story and territory, how we do see ourselves and how others see us.
