I stepped on the asphalt for the first time when I was 10 years old. My town, A Merca, was unpaved.
What images define your childhood?
The angel I never was. All the children had to go dressed as angels for a procession, but the priest finally decided that only the girls would go dressed for their first communion. It made me very angry.
I understand.
My aunts had killed two chickens to make my wings. It was such a disappointment that from then on I didn’t want to go back to church. In my photographic career there are many images with wings.
The subconscious never gives up.
I have many images engraved in my mind that fueled a late vocation that woke up at 40 years of age. The wedding photo of my parents that I had in my room also had a lot of influence.
Absent parents?
They eloped and married when she was 16 and he was 17, the families had been at odds since the Civil War. I was born a year later, they left me with my grandparents and they went to Caracas. Together with my four years in New York that time was the happiest.
What made you happy?
I grew up wild, no pressure, just receiving affection. That’s how I grew up until I was 10 years old, proud of my grandfather, nicknamed the Red for being a Republican.
When did you settle in Barcelona?
When my parents came back from Venezuela we rented a car and went on a tour of Spain. We arrived in Barcelona via the Diagonal and my father said: “There is money here, look at how many cranes”. They were building the university city.
And what did they live on?
They set up a delicatessen. She had eight uncles, all emigrated. Even my grandfather made the Americas, he worked in New York building the subway. “Manoliño, behave yourself or I’ll send you to the subway so you know what hell is,” he told me.
Were you happy in Barcelona?
The city seemed aggressive to me and I lived with parents I didn’t know. My adolescence was difficult, but when I finished my studies I recovered my harmony, I set up a graphic design studio.
Did you speak English when you arrived in New York?
No, I cleaned tables until I learned it and could work on mine.
His first photo?
I left New York because of the AIDS epidemic, every day a friend or an acquaintance died, it was unbearable. I entered as art director of La Vanguardia Mujer and in one of the sessions the photographer did not come and I did the session.
A definite accident.
In two years I changed typography for photography.
What is the best thing that has happened to you?
Being happy with myself has been the most important thing, because that allows me to develop capacities that I couldn’t without that ingredient, such as being more understanding, affectionate, dedicated; For this it is essential that you be at peace with yourself.
Artificial intelligence has landed in photography.
Yes, and it is going to invade everything. That photo where the characters are fake, where everything is fake, is incredible and terrifying, and it’s done by a show. There are programs that plagiarize the style of a certain photographer.
“Do me a Richard Avedon”?
Yes, Avedon me with a couture model through the streets of Paris, and there you have it; and if instead of Avedon you put Newton, you will get an empowered woman, with high heels and in contrasting black and white. And no more models, they will be generated by computer.
He has gone from his unpaved town to an unimaginable technological future.
I remember the night the electric light came to my house: it was magical! And soon came the cinema. They asked all of us to go down to the town square with our chair.
Surprise?
Total. In a truck they hung a sheet, and in front of it a device that was like an upside-down bicycle. We sat around the device, the man yelled: “You have to look over there!”, but no one wanted to lose what they thought was in the first row until it began and I contemplated an image that will never be erased: Chinese shadows of chairs and people moving to reposition themselves.
Is everything in childhood?
Those memories have a great influence on my photography. Today there is a lot of uniformity among young people because they have lived very similar childhoods.
Same extracurricular, same clothes…
There is no place for a child to develop anything that is not programmed or by the parents or by the school, it is sad. I worked since I was a child, I had to take the cows to drink, I remember that light, and there I made my army with mud. That freedom makes you grow with a broad mind no matter how small your town is.
