The creator presents the book ‘Todos los tiempo’, a work so personal to which he has dedicated years and which includes almost fifty black and white images
“The vocation of the book is to talk about something universal through small and everyday things,” defends the author, who travels through the places of his childhood through the footsteps of his own daughter
Is a full break with all his previous work. A new artistic path that he has embarked on and does not intend to leave. And so personal that his protagonists are even his wife and his own daughter. The photographer Raphael Trapiello (Madrid, 1980) even breaks with the exact moment that his camera is capable of portraying every time he presses the lens. goodbye instantly . Everything passes although everything remains. What is shown is what lasts. Or not. Because in his recent book ‘All the times’ -which has also had an exhibition at the Arniches 26 gallery- collects almost fifty snapshots that, precisely, flee from that, from the moment, to evoke that ‘all times’ fit in a photograph.
A alliance in a bare hand, teardrop that falls down the cheek of a little girl who looks at the horizon in search of answers, a moon that, perhaps, is not, nature, water, a piece of furniture full of dust… In short, what we are and what we do , where we are and where we dream of being, but reproduced in black and white. And, furthermore, opening the door for the viewer of this volume to feel a little ‘voyeur’ a voyeur to the most personal part of Trapiello , who is now abandoning the photographic current of the new documentary filmmaking, of which he is an exponent, to show his most personal work.
One of the images from ‘All Time’
«This work began six years ago, when my daughter was born. Although it is true that he has more time because I didn’t even know he was doing this. I come from documentary photography, from the contemporary world. But when my daughter is born, everything that is important ceases to be so. The urgent is no longer. Other needs appear, such as asking yourself who you are or who we are as a species, where we come from… Anyway, the classic questions that art and poetry have dealt with for all time «This is how Trapiello begins the conversation with ABC about this volume, which presents a series of intimate photographs, where hardly any faces appear but which are flooded with love, friendship and nostalgia.
«These are some images that I take intuitively . I start to photograph my family, especially my daughter, also the places of my childhood, but now rediscovered through her steps, and I start asking myself those questions”, confesses the author. Trapiello has changed the documentary for the privacy of his own personal life. He confesses that there has been some modesty when it comes to showing that intimate facet, but also, he narrates, he has felt “freer and at the same time more lost” . «In the end, it is also a work about fatherhood, it can look like and has certain similarities to the work of Sally Mann who is a photographer who has influenced me a lot«, reveals the author.
For him, “I have worked giving meaning to everything I photographed as I saw it.” «This volume resonates or is more like a book of poetry. The vocation is to speak of something universal through small and everyday things. The book opens with the image of a kind of outburst, the ‘big bang’ , but it’s actually a firecracker exploding on the ground. There are many images that are very symbolic but, at the same time, very prosaic«, defends Trapiello. For him, “a problem with photography is that it is very much anchored to the time in which it is made, to the document.” «The documentary function is very important and indisputable, it cannot be denied. But it is a scourge, a very long chain with which he has to carry with respect to other disciplines. For me, it was very important that it was very difficult to identify when the photos were taken, very much in line with what the photographer does Masao Yamamoto . The idea was to separate photography from the moment. I wanted to talk about a universal story that floats in time. In this book there is, for example, a tribute to a photograph of Eugene Smith which I like very much, the one about children through the leaves, and I present my daughter Manuela on the paths that I traveled in childhood«, Trapiello maintains.
Another of the images in the volume, inspired by one of the most iconic snapshots by photographer Eugene Smith
The work, produced thanks to the support of the Campocerrado Foundation and co-published with the Madrid art gallery Arniches 26 is accompanied by a text of Manuel Astur who even goes so far as to qualify Rafael Trapiello as a “tourist of the eternal”. «The photographer has often been linked to the vision of the tourist. He understands that what I develop is an ability to be amazed by the everyday and find resonance with the universal. In part, this work arises from a need to distance myself from the contemporary world. Where there is a lot of noise, where everyone has an opinion, he writes it at the moment. The speed in which we live is increasing… That creates a certain conflict for me. We live in the dictatorship of identity, obsessed with positioning ourselves, labeling ourselves in any field. It happens to us in the West. The problem for me is that identity generates a confrontation because when I recognize what my identity is, it makes me consider it more valuable than the others and generates a relationship of inequality between human beings«, he affirms. »This book is not about searching for identity, but about what unites us as a species. In the end, it is life, death, love, beauty and time”, describes the photographer.
Rafael Trapiello has a career behind him in which he has participated in publications such as ‘Nación Rotonda’, along with Jonah Bel a collective book finalist for the best book of the year at PhotoEspaña 2016; ‘Mercy Wednesday’ (finalist for the best book of the year in PhotoEspaña 2019), and ‘Solovki’ , along with Juan Manuel Castro Prieto, winner of the 2015 National Photography Prize. He assures that, although he is going to continue with his documentary work, he has now embraced a new artistic path. A creative path that he does not intend to abandon, full of beauty and truth.
Report a bug