I made the first photo from the Veils series in Alger. She was a young woman with veil imbued with great magnetism and intensity in her gaze. There was an air of calm mystery and timelessness in her, she was a sphinx.
Here the road forked: the first alternative was to work on woman and the Islamic veil. This is however a topic widely dealt with.
But what would happen if to a series of women with veil I added their counterparts of veiled men? What would happen if women as well as men share veils? The scope widens radically. Instead of speaking about a particular topic as the position of women in Islam, I would focus into talking about “veiled” human beings regardless of their gender or cultural backgrounds, about personal or social veils, about half-hidden human beings however active on their observation of the world. We find ourselves facing characters for whom their eyes are the only instrument to relate to their world. Their gaze is the mechanism that retrieves information as much as the one that gives information to the outside. They are human beings reduced uniquely to the act of gazing.
All time coordinates are removed.
Behind the veil only the eyes remain.
Creating this gallery of characters I had an estrange experience. Never mind if the character was male or female, young or old or which was their social position, all of them are possessed of an estrange calm, many times a contained calm. All of them act as if their veils provided them with a barricade, an unbeatable line of defence behind which the character looks at the world.
To these characters their veil is a way of looking without being seen. But let us not forget that a veil is also a prison: a prison close to the skin.
A veil is the most intimate of prisons.
I have been doing photography since I was a little child. My parents bought me a little Kodak (a short of box/camera with a lens as big as a lentil) and since then I never stopped doing photography. Because photography and travelling has been a constant on my life. In 1973 I moved from Spain to Amsterdam where I started my professional life as a photographer working in advertising photography and also doing my first exhibitions. Then I moved to Asia and during ten years I lived there and travelled constantly through all Asiatic countries photographing everything, everywhere and everybody between heaven and earth. Later I moved to Denmark where I remained another ten years and finally landed on Tenerife, Spain where I live at present. And I keep travelling and photographing everything between heaven and earth.
Juan Angel de Corral
Juan Angel del Corral
Through May 20, 2012
Sala Conca
Plaza de la Concepción 21
38201 La Laguna
Tenerife
Spain
