Monte Alto 우리동네

Having married to a Galician woman, Spain has been a second home to me for the last decade. Photography has been my medium of understanding and connecting with this forever-foreign yet second motherland. Perhaps it’s in this gaze of half foot between the cultures, is what makes me to be obsessed with the little odd things in the ordinaries. 

Monte Alto is where I live now. Once a notorious neighborhood in A Coruña, Galicia, the North West region in Spain. There is a tower made by the Romans, there is an abandoned prison that makes you wonder to be locked up in its ironically beautiful build. Tales of bad ass Galician narcotics coexist with the faiths of pilgrimage on every journey of Camino de Santiago. This is Monte Alto, my neighborhood. The photographs in the series are made while the first phase of national lockdown in Spain that began on the 14th March 2020, during each exit of the house when I brought my dog out for his nature calls. I have shot naturally and intuitively, in an attempt to make sense of the non-senses.

I chose to work on 35mm due to the limited time and access of the limited shooting opportunities. I used a wide angle as I felt that while everyone is using tele-photo from the window, I must take advantage on the fact that I could be outside. With the prints, I first ran a test on staining colour prints in the sea water, rustic water from my studio pipe during the lock down, and hand sanitiser in order to grow bacteria on my prints. 

As the test progressed, I felt it is stronger to print the entire series in Cyanotype, taking advantage of the delicate and fragile characteristic of Chinese calligraphy paper and its origin. And combine with toning each photograph with Chinese Green Tea, Italian Café, and Oak Bark would give me more control over aesthetic throughout the series.