Pablo Antolí talk

Today we had a talk from Pablo, who works both within his own personal practice and also works for various brands and people to fund this. To fund his MA, he had various jobs to help fund it - this included working at the Apple store, working in a butchers and working as a barista. He assisted photographers often in the early stages of his career to develop his skills and build a name for himself alongside this. He stated that he was obsessed with Magnum, which has a lot of really interesting photographers.

For the first project he showed, he said that he simply saved as much money as he could and travelled to Cuba and shot some street photography - this was for some of his own work but he also shot some interior shots and promotional imagery for restaurants and similar places.

I think what is especially interesting about Pablo's work is how you can see his personal approach and style within the work that is shot for a client - there are clear similarities, for example the lighting.

After doing this, he wanted to do some more conceptual work, and this lead to him doing a project using smoke and speakers called 'Sound Traces'. The speakers made the smoke move in interesting ways:

I got this image off of his website because the image I took in the talk ended up being blurry as it didn't have chance to focus on the smoke as he was going through the presentation. I think the way the smoke has been made to move creates a really beautiful flow and movement and works really well as a conceptual piece of photography.

Another project Pablo showed us in his talk was one called 'Night of the Dead', in which he took images of people and the surroundings of a night where people think about the people who are no longer in their lives.

Something he mentioned was that he was interested at one point in doing another MA, but this time in Geography. He felt that this would help him within his work as, if he knew more about the country in which he works, he would be able to create better imagery. He decided that he wasn't very interested in doing this and stuck to photography instead - he mentioned that he joined the Geographical Society instead.

He created a venn diagram on the board for us to demonstrate how he wanted to combine artist documentary, theory and commercial practice:

This is the ideal for his work. The 'ideal' is the middle parts of all three sections which he has shaded in.

The diagram to the left is how he believes his work really works.

A project completely different to what he had been showing us was 'In the memory of images', in which he took images in a shed/allotment in a very traditional and documentary style:

He said that this work looks into 'how the photographic objects behaves' - this is a really interesting concept because you can see within the images how things are starting to rub off, peel or crumple in some way.

Completely different again to anything he had shown in the talk he showed some more work - some fashion work he has done. This was a really strange thing for me to see because he had been showing a lot of documentary work, but it is clear that he is extremely talented in a variety of different aspects of photography.

It is very clear to see that he knows what he is doing when taking a photograph, especially in the realm of lighting as seen in the first image - it is difficult to place an object on the same coloured background and still make the product stand out. His work has been published in Vogue and GQ. Within the talk, this was the work that interested me the most as this is the career area I think I am wanting to go into, and what is more interesting is how much his work contrasts. Even though he may not be particularly interested in fashion, it is clear that he still tries really hard when doing this work.

He briefly mentioned that he has done some food photography for travel magazines, but didn't seem to have much to say about these - seemingly as this is something he admittedly only really did for the money to help him fund his own practice. Again, this work is really beautifully lit and it is easy to imagine the work in a magazine as it looks really enticing.

The last work I am going to mention is the work he did entitled 'Tectonics'. For this body of work, he was looking at how the landscape is made and used maps to help develop the work.

These images are from a specific section of the work called 'Shiftings'. For these, he took images of paper to try to resemble famous landmarks within the world.

Fractures:

He created an installation of 'Shiftings', which uses 2 prints of the same image separated by a frame and as the viewer would walk around it, would cause the view to be altered:

He also created an installation for 'Fractures', in which he has created a print to resemble a topographical map and the way the paper has been creased creates a 3D image, which makes the project have an added interest:

Quote from Pablo Antolí, on what the work represents: