CARREFOUR, SUNDAY 12 P.M. For the past ten years, every Sunday at 12 p.m. when the weather is sunny, the photographer, seated on the roof of his van about three and a half metres above the ground, has been welcoming people who come to spend their day off in the Carrefour car park in El […]
My Kingdom (Publication date: August 2018) My Kingdom by Catalan photographer Txema Salvans offers a sharp-witted insight into contemporary Spanish society, and a wry comment on the climate of power in the artist’s home country. Salvans splices together blackand-white photographs of ordinary citizens enjoying the Mediterranean coast, with citations from the political rhetoric of former King of […]
What Remains of the Landscape. While popular culture beguiles us with the myth of an untamed nature in which to get away from the frustrations of our daily lives, our most habitual experience keeps us tied either to mass tourism or to fleeting escapes to places that are simply what is left of the landscape: […]
From “A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again.” Righ now it’s Saturday 18 March, and I’m sitting in the extremely full cofee shop of the Fort Lauderdale Airport, killing the four hours between when I had to be off the cruise ship and when my flight to Chicago leaves by trying to summon up […]
To make a family photo you need several generations. In other words, a human distribution in the photo in which the viewer perceives a defined and effective distribution of the frailness or the toughness, the strength or the weakness, the fortune or the bad luck. Txema Salvans’ skill – or technique (¿) – consists of […]
What is it about Spain, prostitution and photography? One of the best known collections of Spanish post war photographs is Joan Colom’s remarkable study of prostitutes hanging out in Barcelona. This was published as a book in 1964. Many years later we have Txema Salvan’s set of photographs showing prostitution in urban and rural roadside […]
The Hook Fishing has been a familiar metaphor for photography for a long time now. Hunting, too, describing the street photographer who chases on foot and reacts quickly. ‘Fishing’ is slower and more contemplative. Less physical, more cerebral, perhaps. In the beautiful afterword to his book Uncommon Places, the American photographer Stephen Shore wrote: The trout […]
The Waiting Game is an artistic project that explores three of the characteristics that define us as a species: we are social, self-aware animals that live in relation to our environment. The physical presence of man or animal in rural, urban and industrial spaces reveals the dystopian relationship of human beings with themselves, with others […]