Abstract architectural photography

Photographed by:

Pedro Pegenaute

Brief description

1997. I was looking at a magazine, I don't remember which one, what I do remember is what I saw inside. She took up about half of one of the pages. It was a texture with different shades of gray, and full of dots that looked like small holes, and they diminished in size as they went away, until they reached a slight curvature that looked like the edge of something. There was no reference to scale, making it even more difficult to decipher what it really was. It could be a photograph or a drawing, even a photocopy. At first I thought it was the earth seen from a NASA satellite, the typical image that we have seen thousands of times in which the smooth roundness of our planet is appreciated. Only those dots were on the surface. The earth could not be, that it was another planet seemed strange to me. I didn't know what it was but it wasn't totally foreign to me either, it was a strange sensation. I couldn't stop looking at that image, I was trapped, like when you're in the cinema with the projection on. I imagined different things in a very short time, I felt very attracted and at the same time a bit confusing. But I liked that feeling. Suddenly, after looking at the image for a while, I saw what it was and I was impressed. It seemed incredible to me to realize that what I was seeing was the skin of an orange photographed from very close, enough that I did not know what it was at first glance. How could something as common as an orange have caused me so much in such a short time? Obviously it was not the orange itself that caused them, but the way the orange was represented in that image, in that photograph. Or in other words, how someone looked in that way, his own, something as common as the skin of an orange, and was able to transmit it in such a successful way to the viewer with a simple photograph. I never knew who its author was. That´s the key, I felt things. I felt suggested, definitely I felt emotion. That feeling of not knowing what I'm seeing, but if I keep looking I'll know, it's what got me. A perfect riddle. No more no less. Just abstraction so as not to know at first what it is, but not too much so as to never guess. The photographic act itself, my way of doing, is not limited to places or specific reasons, it is more the simple fact of being there, immersed in what you have in front of you, and in a matter of an instant see. Then I feel the irrepressible urge to catch what I have seen with the camera. I hold my breath and shoot.I know if I don't do it then it will disappear forever. It is an intuitive and spontaneous act, and it hardly lasts a moment. It requires a high state of concentration, and a high degree of sensitivity and spatial ability. Where paradoxically, the photographic technique takes a back seat. Definitely it is about that: Being able to perceive something and discover its essentiality through the camera. Whatever it is and wherever you are. With my work I invite the viewer to contemplation, I want him to feel different sensations, to feel suggested. With it I am telling him my perception of the world, my way of seeing it and understanding it. Make the invisible visible. A visual language that does not attend to reasons, but to emotions, which I felt when I was there and which I want to convey, but through images, not words.