Spanish photographer Arnau Blanch’s starkly gripping images explore the subconscious in unexpected ways.
With his stark black-and-white images, Spanish photographer Arnau Blanch takes us on a journey into the recesses of our minds.
Projects such as Veneno and Fantasmas use photography to connect how we experience places with our subconscious.
Veneno (�Poison�)�was shot between 2008 and 2014;�it is set in the jungles of Colombia but, rather than photographing the lush foliage and spectacular canopies, Blanch examines a sinister landscape in which anything can � and does � happen.
There are images of sex, weapons, the latent threat of violence; everything is shot�bure bokeh, a style in which extremes of contrast echo the extremes of the subject matter. They look like sequences from a discomforting dream, one in which our secret obsessions are only partially disguised by the symbols of our unconscious.
A graduate of Barcelona�s Institute d�Estudis Fotograpics de Catalunya, Blanch has also studied at New York�s ICP and was selected for the Joop Swart Masterclass in 2013.
�I�ve been following Arnau�s work for a few years now since I saw his Veneno/Colombia work at a portfolio review,� says Liza Faktor, founder of the Screen Your World project. �Arnau has a very strong and coherent relationship between his outstanding visuals and determination to document and follow the story. He has invested a lot into his Colombian project over several years of taking trips over there whenever he could and doing all kinds of crazy subjects. As a result he has this very poetic and at the same time tough imagery that I believe give us a picture of Colombia we haven�t seen before.�
Blanch has used a similar style in his later�project, Fantasmas, �a subjective representation of anxiety� that reveals the phantoms of his soul. Here the extreme contrast brings out the rough surfaces of roads, hair and plants, rendering them threatening and almost alive. �[Blanch] continues to explore how far can he stretch his language,� says Faktor. �I think it�s plain brilliant, cinematic as well. There is quite a unique context to both of these projects. It�s hard to nail it down � but it�s definitely there. It�s obvious that he knows what he�s talking about.�
See more of Arnau�s work here.
First published in the January 2014 issue. You can buy the issue here.
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.