FROM JANUARY 17th TO MAY 18TH, 2025
ARTISTS: Lola Barcia Albacar and Marinela Forcadell Breva (Fotolateras)
Lola Barcia and Marinela Forcadell started cooking images in 2008; that was the moment when Fotolateras were born. The story began when Lola infected Marinela with her fascination for pinhole imaging, a technique based on the basic procedure of photography. This process consists of creating a camera obscura from an object, introducing a photosensitive paper inside, placing it in front of the object to be photographed, opening a small hole and letting the light enter the object and do its work. The origins of this method seem to go back to the Neolithic, but it also left its mark on cultures such as the Arabic,
Chinese, Greek and Roman during antiquity. It is said that Canaletto would have used this process to draw the sketches from which his Venice paintings started, although it is quite possible that he was not the only classical painter to use it. Velázquez, Ingres, Vermeer and Caravaggio may also have used this technique to construct some of their works. The magic of the camera obscura has traveled through the centuries. No technology has managed to bury it. It is a secret strategy that survives in its own silent way.Fotolateras state that they don’t take pictures, they cook them. They don’t just shoot images. What they do is looking for them, using patience and intuition. They are the antithesis of the urgency of our days and the speed fed by the demands of the digital world. Fotolateras do not shoot. In their work, the sound of the click is replaced by a silence that lasts for minutes. They think about each photo, they calculate it taking into account the intensity of the light. In pinhole photography, the image obtained is the result of the division between the amount of available light and the exposure time. There is serenity in their way of doing and observing, or perhaps we should rather say that their work is the result of serenity. They use the essential to obtain what they are looking for. They assure that in their creative process there is no space for haste: they get rid of everything superfluous and let the images appear full of serenity. No “fotolata” -let’s say they have earned the right to baptize their style as such- is made in a hurry. The process requires its own time, a time that dictates the result. “It’s concentration in action”, they say. That’s why they have coined this phrase about themselves: “Everyone goes their own way except us, who go our own way”.
In his novel The Beautiful and the Sad, Yasunari Kawabata wrote: “The trees seemed covered with dewy blossoms. It was the subtle bloom of spring rain; a bloom that almost everyone overlooked”. Some of the photographs by Fotolateras manage to capture details that the human eye, immersed in the daily hustle and bustle, does not perceive. The “fotolatas” have the virtue of offering us new details every time we return to them. Agnès Varda once said that we have to invent life. With their arsenal of cans and their photographic philosophy, Fotolateras invent life. They feel that their photos follow the path proposed by Kawabata’s literature. If we look at it carefully, Fotolateras’ logo is the flag of Japan positived, miniaturized, turned into a pinhole. It is a zen symbol and, like the work of cooking their images, it turns out hypnotic.
In the construction of each of these images there is thought, deduction, interpretation, an attitude and a look. Through them we learn to contemplate in a different way nature, architecture, people. Their great specialty, the theme that began to guide their photographic project more than fifteen years ago, is cities. Fotolateras work mainly in the street, anchored in the middle of the urban hustle and bustle. Two women handling a tripod with a coffee can on top. Watching them working is like attending a remote ritual. Oblivious to the rush, focused on their objective, they form an anomaly that also teaches us to interpret ourselves. “I am a kind of spy” said the photographer Vivienne Maier of herself, whom Fotolateras consider a fundamental point of reference both for her way of focusing the lens and for her way of conceiving images. Maier designed her own economy of means. She imposed on herself the discipline of taking no more than seven photos a day. She drew very well her limits that delimit her work: time, space, economy, society, our own conscience». In the end, they also operate as if they were confidants of a reality that we will only come to know when their images are revealed. They materialize in images what T S Eliot wrote: “Thus, the darkness will be the light and the stillness, the dance”.
Tokyo, New York, Venice, Beijing, London, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Bologna, Tampa, Valencia and of course, Castellón, the base of operations of the two photographers. They have photographed landscapes and people, but the cities are the backbone of their project, the ones that have made it grow, the ones that have given it a powerful identity. Each city is a new challenge because it implies undertaking, once again, the knowledge of a new light. Because each light requires a different temperature inside that baking oven that is the can. This is how they define their cameras, the can is the oven, and the photographic paper, the food to be cooked;the light of Tokyo in January, the light of Marrakech in summer. In 2009, it was the light of New York that gave them their first big challenge. They went in search of the most representative buildings and could not stop exploring the visual possibilities of the urban context. Then the need to travel to Japan became necessary. Marinela has been studying the country’s culture, language and gastronomy for years. Their first visit to Tokyo was a revelation. They absorbed the visual stimulus of a city where tradition and modernity coexist in a striking way. The balance between minimalism and maximalism. They themselves explain their strategy for capturing metropolitan images: “First we look for the iconic buildings of each place. Our goal is to achieve an image that, by itself, is capable of defining a city. The Eiffel Tower photographed from an angle that makes it an almost feminine, sensual figure. An Amsterdam canal framed through the wheel of a bicycle. The silhouette of a person protected by an umbrella contemplating the sea in Gijón. Achieving that level of synthesis is our goal, to be able to convey the essence of a place with a single image”. Because photography, said Vivian Maier, is not an invention but a discovery.
That they themselves have ended up appearing more than any other human figure in their works is inherent to the very dynamics of the cooking of their photos. Here, the exposure time is infinitely longer than in conventional photography. Immobility is fundamental and from there comes that old recurring phrase that warns that whoever moves does not appear in the photo. People who swarm through the streets they photograph are not aware that they will end up as ghosts. Lola and Marinela, on the other hand, know the secret of not disappearing: immobility. They have achieved such feats as appearing in St. Mark’s Square in Venice with no one around; they have also immortalized themselves in Brandenburg Square and Tiananmen Square, places that, thanks to them, appear before our eyes as phantasmagoric scenes, oblivious to the bustle of pedestrians and tourists. Photolateras empty the environment. They remain alone with it. In addition to spies, they are alchemists. Nomadic alchemists who know how much truth there is in that quote by Susan Sontag who said that to collect photographs is to collect the world. As they accumulate images, they accumulate knowledge, wisdom. Their own gaze gives them back those details that we would not otherwise perceive. They are disseminators of small secret truths.
For Fotolateras, technique is nothing more than a way to enhance the photographic moment. They control the entire process: the construction of the camera, the choice of the camera, the planning of the photograph and its subsequent development. Their procedures are simple. They always use a 0.4 millimeter pinhole and the same type of paper. The only variables are light and exposure time. Their objectives have been defining their methodology. That is why they take a portable laboratory with them on their trips, which allows them to evaluate the results as soon as possible. Their suitcases are full of chemical liquids, developing papers and cans. They can monuments and develop the images in the hotel room. It is impossible to predict exactly what is going to appear in one of those snapshots that they always develop in negative, because they consider that the image in negative is much richer. From inside their cans life is projected.
According to Susan Sontag, the painter constructs and the photographer reveals. Fotolateras’ images penetrate through the retina and reach the interior of the viewer. Seeing their images or learning to make them from their hand is a transformative process, Healing, because it teaches us things about ourselves that we did not know before. It teaches us to relate to time, to be intimate with light, to know more.
