20.05.2022

"More than Full Frame" x Chema Madoz

Photography is an illusory space

Photography is an illusory space, in which reality allows a rearrangement of reading codes. You can place and arrange, manipulate, alter and give body to concepts, emotions or materialize breath.

GFX100S & GF63mmF2.8 R WR

I discovered photography by chance in the eighties and, soon after starting to practice it, I realised that I was faced with an activity that allowed me to handle a language. In some way I could direct the reading that the viewer would later make of that image. In short, it is a game that allows you to transmit ideas.

It wasn’t easy to find a way of telling stories that I felt was my own, and it took me a long time to leave aside everything that I found accessory. The people were soon one of the elements sacrificed in this search for what was essential.
These changes in the choice of working material brought me closer to the object and that also meant changing my equipment. I began to work with a medium format camera that was more suited to the type of work I was beginning to do. A more leisurely, more meditated work, in which everything that appeared in the image had its place and its reason.
There is a somewhat ascetic, almost Spartan idea in the whole process, that of working with as few elements as possible, using natural light and equipment consisting simply of a camera and a tripod. The rest is in the head and the exercise consists of making it visible to me and to others.

I owe a debt to objects, and that is that, apart from helping me in my daily life, they have helped me to understand life in a different way, in a richer, deeper way.

GFX100S & GF63mmF2.8 R WR

And whenever I talk about objects, it is always understood that they are the ones on the other side of the camera, but the camera itself is still another object and in this case, having the opportunity to work with the GFX100S has allowed me to find an unprecedented definition that I had not even suspected until now. It leaves floating in the air that biblical expression that refers to “the all-seeing eye”. If we keep our distance, we could understand it as a reference to the GFX100S.