18.07.15
Juror’s Honorable Mention and exhibition Landscapes at The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins

Las Encantadas No.3, which is part of the series Las Encantadas, has been shortlisted for the exhibition Landscapes at The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado. The Juror, Chantel Paul, was the person in charge of the curation. In addition, the picture has been also awarded with the Juror’s Honourable Mention. This photograph is part of the project Las encantadas developed in 2010. For this series of pictures carried out at Galapagos Islands, I dived into the idea of the landscape as an attitude that is capable to express emotions and feelings. In a way, I’ld like to show the sublime unexplored encounters in which one can uncover enrichment and meaning. For this body of work, the historical controversy regarding Pictorialism in photography was used as a starting point. Pictorialism was an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph, as a mean of “creating” an image rather than simply capturing it. Relating this to our present moment, and assuming that the media revolution has reached a point in which the digital brushes have been replaced by the physical ones, I intended to use this contemporary tool, which is digital photography, in order to reproduce the emotions I experienced in these Islands. The title of the project comes from one of the first maps of the area, in which the following note was included: “Enchanted Islands”. I found this adjective —in Ecuadorian Spanish “Las Encantadas”— very pertinent with the emotion I was trying to express: the Galapagos as an unreal and magical space out-of-the-world, where human touch is barely visible. This picture is currently exhibited at the The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado — a non-profit organization founded by photographers in 2004.