Fuego Books is a small publishing house based in the southeast of Spain. It was founded by two siblings, Ángela and Gustavo Alemán, in 2014.

A Place Both Wonderful and Strange is a photographic anthology that brings together the work of 12 international photographers in a narration inspired by Twin Peaks and the work of David Lynch.

With the work of Anna Beeke, Carl Bigmore, Melissa Catanese, Cristina de Middel, Salvi Danés, Enrico Di Nardo + Valentina Natarelli, Antone Dolezal, Philippe Fragniere, Jason Fulford, Rory Hamovit, Sara Palmieri and Sarah Walker.

This is the last photo book I bought and I absolutely love it. It is a very “lynchian” book and the title says it all… wonderful and strange. Highly recommended.

Pascual Martínez (Murcia, 1977) and Vincent Sáez (Almoradí, 1976) are two Spanish photographers working together. They combine their work as photographers with teaching, designing and curating photography exhibitions.

Seduced by human relations and the study of society through photography as a means of anthropological exploration, they carry out independent projects reflecting upon identity from a natural environment perspective as the main axis of their speech, trying to transmit and represent new realities far away from clichés. 

In 2014 they began working on the project titled “The tree of life is eternally green” in the city of Bucharest, in Romania. This work has been selected at “Full Contact Scan 2016”, “Descubrimientos PhotoEspaña 2015”, “Encontros da Imagem 2014” in Braga (Portugal), and finalist at “Barcelona International Photography Awards (BIPA) Lens Culture 2015” and at “20 Fotopres La Caixa”, winner of the “Hacer” contest of the PHotoEspaña-Comunidad de Madrid Forum, selected in Photographic Itineraries at Pa-ta-ta Festival in Granada, and recently exhibited at Molinos del Río_Caballerizas in Murcia and in Espai Fotogràfic Can Basté at Barcelona.

‘The Tree Of Life Is Eternally Green is foremost about nature; about its wild and pure state, the ways it respects and manages itself, untamed, and about the complex relationships that humans establish with it.

We felt that, since the first inhabitants of Europe populated its fertile lands, the driving rhythm of Romanian society has been instinctively linked to the land – just like the roots of a tree organically find their way, entangled with other living beings.

To look at the outward appearance of a tree, it is simply a trunk covered in bark, with extended branches adorned in leaves. This is relative to our superficial view of a country that isn’t ours, where we can’t necessarily comprehend its true values beneath the surface. Stereotypes are products of ignorance and theories, and only show an external version of reality. Our images look in just a singular direction, attempting to see the essence of things in the uncomplicated gestures that make up a story both complex and simple at once.

“My worthy friend, gray are all theories, and green alone Life’s golden tree”, said Mephistopheles, to a curious student in Goethe’s Faust.’

http://ninorojo.com/

David Simon Martret & Blanca Galindo (1984) are a documentary photography duo working together as Leafhopper and currently living between Barcelona and Kuala Lumpur. David Simon Martret studied philosophy at UB and photography at IEFC. Blanca obtained her Media degree at UAB and University of California SB, expanding her photo studies at IDEP and Cienojos’s Invernadero Grant. They combine assignments and personal projects. Their photography works and articles explore human adaptation in controversial politico-social environments, creating critical and self-reflexive documents. Particularly interested in exploring the concept of identity in marginal contexts, their work has appeared in media such as VICE, Aint Bad, Fisheye Magazine, Yet Magazine, Playground Magazine, Yorokobu, El País Semanal, Bust Magazine, Darwin Magazine, Humble Arts Foundation or JUICE Magazine Malaysia.

Their work has also been exhibited at festivals such as Encontros da Imagem, PhotoIreland, Obscura Photofestival, Scan Festival, Art Photo Barcelona or Visa pour l’image OFF. Their project on a gay and transgender nightclub, operating on the fringes of the law in Kuala Lumpur, was selected as part of Photoespaña’s Descubrimientos 15, and was subsequently picked up by the Institute Artist Stories agency. Their last work It’s a Wonderful Life it is a visual essay about general addictions and was finalist at Gomma Photography Grant 2017.

Blue Boy KL is a photographic project depicting an LGBT nightclub from the 80’s in Malaysian capital city, Kuala Lumpur. 

Beyond claiming gender and sexual freedom, this club existence is one more trace that corruption goes further than moral laws, and religion can be used as an extortion tool. 

Between the dark walls of Blue Boy, fiction and real life get mixed under a controlled freedom.

http://www.leafhopper.eu

Today I want to introduce the work of emerging Spanish photographer Paco Poyato. I discovered Paco’s work after seeing one of his photos on the poster of the International Photography Festival Photoalicante 2016. Since then I have followed his work very closely and we have been establishing a friendship through social media.

Paco has a personal style. Direct, powerful and full of energy.

Poyato’s work is focused in the consumer society we live.

“I am interested in the term ‘globalization’ understood as the loss of the identity of the individual in favor of a model that responds to criteria closely linked to the control of power and banality, and its effect on what surrounds me”

His project Lust Days explores the pursuit of happiness and pleasure in adolescence.

“Its known the searching for happiness is a constant pursued by the human being throughout his life to give a certain meaning to his existence. It is a very abstract concept, in which there are several ways and not all equal to reach it. This work explores the sensorial, hedonistic way in which this precious good of happiness is associated with sensory and immediate pleasure nowadays in adolescence.”

Paco studied a Foundation Degree in Photography and some courses of Documentary Photography and Photobooks in Blank Paper School (Now Dinamo Visual Lab). He has attended workshops with Martin Parr, Joan Fontcuberta, Ricardo Cases and Leafhopper Project. His work has been selected for ‘Descubrimientos Photoespaña’, he has participated in several group exhibitions in Madrid, Castellón, Alicante and Berlin and is one of the artists who were part of the exhibition ‘Un cierto panorama’, recent author photography in Spain.

www.pacopoyato.com

Sole Satana is my partner in work and life. I met Sole when we were teenagers because we lived in the same neighborhood and we liked the same things. A few years later, we studied photography together.

Sole and I have similar interests and I think our vision is a really good fit. She adds to our works a cool satirical, “ugly-worshiping” point of view that compliment mine. We make a good team and everything flows easily.

Fiambre was our first series and the starting point for new collaborations.

The Pork Week is an annual agriculture and livestock fair held in our town. It is an important event here. We have always known about it, but never caught our interest. After studying photography and living in a different city for 7 years, we thought that it could be an interesting project and we decided to attend and document it with our own vision.

We found shocking to see important businessmen and pigs together in the same place, also humble farmers and people that only came for the food. There were kids looking at the animals sweetly while their parents were talking about all the meat they can get from them as if they were already dead. The fact that you can see people eating ham in front of a living pig could be “normal”, but we found it a little bit “creepy”. We like to play with the duality between normal and peculiar and analyze it in a satirical way.

Sole Satana is a documentary and fine art photographer based in Murcia, Spain. She studied Audiovisual Image (2009-2011) and Artistic Photography (2011-2012). Satana’s work has been published in various online publications including British Journal of Photography, Humble Arts Foundation, Der Greif “Guest-Room”, and It’s Nice That.

Her photos are closely related to her personal life. Most of them tell the story of what she lives and her surroundings. She has great interest in portraying people and all kinds of lifestyles.

She is also interested in documenting society, traditions and events, especially if there is any trace of decadence or particularity, and always taking them to her field, trying to convey the sensations and the atmosphere more than the fact itself, always under a satirical, “ugly-worshipping” and subjective point of view, and always looking for the extraordinary in the ordinary.

http://solesatana.es/
http://jdvaliente.com/