Artist Blog
Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.
Fiambre – JD Valiente & Sole Satana
Jun 14, 2018 - Jose David Valiente
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.