20 October 2009
By Francisco Cedeño
Claudi Carreras was born in 1973, in a small town in Barcelona, called Gracia. He is a veterinarian who began in photography by taking pictures of sea mammals. He decided he wanted to takes pictures because he could travel from one place to another documenting the different realities he found.
He came for the first time to Latin America when he was 18. He went to Argentina and fell in love with the place. “The landscape, the people…everything captivated me and I decided I wanted to work there.”
He wrote a PhD thesis about the construction of the identity of Latin American photography. “I was shocked how Europe perceives Latin America, it’s very biased but the realities of the work of the photographer are very assorted and different.”
He is a professor of photography in the image design department of the University of Barcelona.
Working at a Barcelona newspaper, he traveled around Latin-American working on a photo essay called “Auto Retrato de América Latina” which shows every country from the insight of the authors. After that he published the book “Conversaciones con Fotógrafos Mexicanos”, in which photography’s situation is described and how it has put aside the usual way of showing the facts to show the realities through other types of platforms.
Carreras is interested in photography with a social link that talks about our environment, and us what we do and what happens to us every day.
Right now he is organizing, gathering and editing the photographical exposition “Laberinto de Miradas”, a project made of three expositions titled “Identities and Borders”, “Frictions and conflicts in Latin America” and “American Photography Collective.” During the month of September “Identities and Borders” was exhibited in Nicaragua. It is the work of 35 photographers that tackled the themes of ‘identity’ and ‘borders’ from different points of view.
How did you begin working as a photographer in Latin America?
I worked for a long time taking pictures of the Andes zone in Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile. Once I went through a crisis in Bolivia; there were 60 deaths in one weekend. Those pictures were the ones I’ve sold the best and that experience made me reflect about the situation of photography nowadays and helped me understand that it’s those types of images that the media cares about the most. Those are the tricky images that make photographers a type of scavenger. These create a lot of contradictions, and not because they have to be photographed, but because it was hard for me to think that my partners were limited to taking pictures of those kinds of situations. So, I decided to spread a different type of photography with different themes.
How did the Laberinto de Miradas project begin?
It is a Project that takes a lot of work and involves a lot of people. It started in 2005 when the “La Vanguardia” started preparing Latin American photographs. It has kept me traveling all over the continent contacting photographers and gathering material. That’s when I decided to have an exposition that crossed the work of Latin American and Spanish photographers. And we organized a meeting with other international curators to see all the work that had been done and decide which was the look that should be presented from Latin America. A developed vision was chosen, one that showed the contrasts between the concepts of the border and globalization.
With the experience you’ve gathered lately, which is your interpretation about Latin American photography?
It’s impossible to talk about Latin America, its identity is something that is diluted because you ask yourself what countries like Brazil and Nicaragua or Argentina and Mexico have in common. They are different realities; we are just combined by a language and a common culture. Also there isn’t Latin-American photography itself. I couldn’t say what it is, but I could say how the rest of the world interprets it. I can say that they are many works that show the countries realities in which they are produced. But it’s interesting the idea of an internal look about what’s going on.
With “Laberinto de Miradas”, what is the opportunity that globalization gives Latin-American photography?
It’s an incredible communication tool that opens up huge possibilities. For example, a big Latin-American photo agency has been created from photographers. Through globalization medias, such as the Internet, you can see the photographers work and talk to them. I work with people from 20 different countries. We can stay be in touch while making very different creations in different parts of the world.
What is the subjective vision of photography?
Photography is an arrow that goes straight to you and awakens your imagination. There is a phrase that says that is like when a butterfly flaps its wings, at the time she flaps them you can’t see it because it’s very fleeting, but somehow its twinkle lets you reflect about something. In photography everything is subjective: when the audience sees photography, it spreads imagination.
It’s the approach from an author to want to show something and the audience wants to interpret it. We’ll never show reality from photography, but we’ll show a vision of that reality.
Which is the role of the Image meaning in photography?
Now that we are in the image era, we have to teach people how to read photography. I think it’s very important that people know how to interpret the images so they know that when they see a photo, they are not facing a reality, they are interpreting it.
As a photographer Curator, how do you feel about photo editing?
I think it’s one of the biggest failures in many countries. There are people who can take really good pictures but they can’t edit their work. As a photo editor I see a huge variety of works and it’s something I find very often. That’s why I’m always gathering with photographers to analyze their pictures, give them comments and help them to have an improved final product.
Why are there divisions between conceptual photography and photojournalism?
It’s a complex situation, the viewers don’t always try to see the reality from an image, they are analyzing the context. So the photojournalism feels entrenched because its main objective is to show a reality, not the interpretation. I feel that photography nowadays repeats the same thought expressed in different ways and people are a little tired of those creative artistic speeches that are too conceptual.
There is a more documental perspective, to move us with images, or that’s how I want to think because that’s how it is for me. There are photographers who are interested in a social look about what they see, an investigation about a determined reality. There are also photographers that stick to themselves. They are more interested in showing their vision of the world, talking more about themselves that about others.
What is your critical look with respect to Latin-American photography?
Photography today has enormous possibilities for dissemination. We just have to assume that certain traditional channels no longer work and seek ways to generate new proposals, to enrich your own speech from another, use the communicative power of photography and stop repeating external models simply because they are trendy and in fashion.
Photography today has enormous possibilities for dissemination. We just have to assume that certain traditional channels no longer work and seek ways to generate new proposals, to enrich your own speech from another, use the communicative power of photography and stop repeating external models, only because they are patterns and fashion.
For example, I come to Nicaragua with all the enthusiasm in the world to see what is being done and when I find such photographs concerning or relating to that I think what sense does it make to repeat things already done, already seen so much? We must seek new ideas and new languages.
