Instagram @isabelmiquelarques
Isabel Miquel Arques
SPAIN - BELGIUM
Born in Lleida (Spain), Isabel Miquel Arqués is a fine art photographer, visual artist, writer and storyteller. Daughter of a concert grade pianist mother and a businessman father and amateur photographer, her father gave her her first camera at the age of ten, a Kodak Instamatic 25.
Isabel started her career as photo assistant and gallery assistant in Spain. She has lived in Barcelona, Amsterdam and London. She works and lives since 2005 in Antwerp (Belgium), where she has developed her artistic career.
Isabel finds her own way between tradition and modernity. She is in search for the soul in the medium of photography. The strength that resides in fragility, beauty and poetry. With attention to materiality, transparency, texture and tactility, she approaches her art works as physical objects, sculptures present in time and space, emphasizing the idea that imperfections and traces have to be seen and not hidden, as traces make us who we are.
Isabel is currently working on a trilogy of visual artistic dialogues with three iconic women that have always been part of her artistic universe: Karen Blixen, Virginia Woolf, and Georgia O'Keeffe.
- SERIES -
The Roxy
Amsterdam 1992
I was new in the city and had already heard of The Roxy.
It had a rough reputation, and I knew that getting permission to take pictures inside was rare.
The Roxy had announced one of its famous/infamous parties alongside an underwear fashion show by a German designer. The theme of the occasion was "Drop your pants."
I had never heard of such a theme before, so I thought it was the right moment to ask if I could photograph the evening's events.
My appointment was in one of the apartments above Roxy. I don’t remember which floor, but I recall the strong smell of cigarettes and, on a low side table, an ashtray with a plastic eyeball.
The man I was talking to was calm and kind, dressed in black. He wanted to know which country I was from and why I was interested in photographing the event.
"I’ve heard inside is beautiful," I said. "I’m curious to discover how this beauty works with the 'drop your pants' theme."
He must have found me exotic. Not because of my Spanish nationality, I’m sure, but because I looked so normal.
"No flash. For the rest, you can do whatever you want," he said. "Come back to show me the pictures once you have them."