I stepped on asphalt for the first time when I was 10 years old. My town was unpaved.
What images define your childhood in A Merca?
The angel I never was. All the children had to be dressed as angels for a procession, but the priest decided in the end that only the girls would go dressed for first communion. It made me very angry.
I understand.
My aunts had killed two chickens to make me wings. It was such a big 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 engraved in my mind many images that fueled a late vocation that was awakened in my 40s. The wedding photo of my parents in my bedroom was also very influential.
Absent parents?
They eloped and married when she was 16 and he was 17, the families having been at odds since the Civil War. I was born a year later, they left me with my grandparents and they went to Caracas. Besides my four years in New York, that time was the happiest.
What made him happy?
I grew up wild, without pressure, with love. So until the age of 10, proud of my grandfather, called el Roig because he was a republican.
When is it going to install in Barcelona?
When my parents came back from Venezuela we rented a car and went on a trip around Spain. We arrived in Barcelona via the Diagonal and my father said: “There is money here, look how many cranes”. They were building the university town.
And what did they live on?
They opened a delicatessen. He had eight uncles, all immigrants. Even my grandfather did the Americas, he worked in New York building the subway. “Manoliño, behave 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. Adolescence was difficult, but I regained harmony and opened a graphic design studio.
Did he speak English when he arrived in New York?
No, I cleaned tables until I learned it and could work at my craft.
Your first photo?
I left New York because of the AIDS epidemic, every day a friend or 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.
A definite accident.
In two years I changed typography to photography.
What is the best thing that has happened to you?
Being happy with myself has been the most important thing, because this allows me to develop abilities that I couldn’t without that ingredient, such as being more understanding, affectionate, devoted; that is why it is essential that you are at peace with yourself.
Artificial intelligence has landed in photography.
Yes, and it will invade everything. That shot where the characters are fake, that everything is fake, is incredible and terrifying, and a show does that. There are programs that plagiarize the style of a particular photographer.
“Fes-me un Richard Avedon�
Yes, make me an Avedon with a haute couture model on the streets of Paris, and there you have it; and if instead of Avedon you put Newton, you get an empowered woman, with high heels and contrasting black and white. And the models are finished, they will be generated by computer.
It has gone from its unpaved village to an unimaginable technological future.
I remember the night the electric light came to the house – it was magical! And soon after came the cinema. They asked us all to go down to the town square with a chair.
Surprise?
total They hung a sheet on a truck, and in front of it, a device that was like an upside-down bicycle. We sat around the device, the gentleman shouting: “They must look over there!” but no one wanted to miss what they thought was the first row until it started, and I saw a picture that I don’t remember. will ever erase: 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 in young people because they have experienced very similar childhoods.
Same extracurriculars, same clothes…
There is no place for a child to develop anything that is not programmed either by the parents or by the school, it is sad. I worked from a young age, 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.
