Barcelona based photographer Alex Llovet recently sent me a copy of his new bookwork Faraway so Close. The book is in a edition of 400 copies with monochrome images rendered in deeply satisfying blacks on a luscious satin paper stock. Many of the photographs resonate with unanswered questions, formulated from the photographers past life experience and what is unmistakably his quest to find meaning. This is a passionately personal book and that's all to the good. The simple images come from the heart, a place where I feel the best work usually comes from. There is no clever artifice here, just pictures that hum with promise.
Alex Llovet says this about Faraway so Close: This is the diary of a journey. In 2009 I became a father. Overnight, and with no idea of what was in store, I saw my wife give birth to our first daughter. A deep love towards that tiny person slowly inundated my life. But the stronger the light, the darker are the shadows, and becoming a father sent me back to dark episodes of my own childhood. You cannot be a father without the memory of being a son, so five years later, I aim to fuse these two roles through photography in the search for my own identity: I go into the woods, sometimes alone, sometimes with my daughter, because that is where my memories lie, and where realities resonate as distant in time and space as they are near emotionally. And this exercise inevitably describes the limits between reality and fiction (like my pictures, some of them “found” and some “staged”), because the passing of time pushes the truth into forgetfulness and maximizes the imagination.
You can see more on Alex Llovet's website HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment