Your name
Oskar Alvarado
Place of birth
Vitoria-Gasteiz - Spain
Place where you live now
Barcelona - Spain
3 words to describe you
Solitary, observant and introspective.
Why do you take pictures?
I don’t understand reality. I’ve never understood it. My perspective on reality has always been a kind of wandering around it, without knowing exactly when I entered and left its core. My gaze begins within as a mental image and is projected outward like a photographic image filtered by my personal way of perceiving the outside. Photography connects soul and vision, and in that interval, the gaze is defined. It’s the projection of my mind through the camera that allows me to fold that written sheet of paper that is supposed to be reality, and from it I underline only the lines that interest me, or literally jumble them up. I change the tense and the verb in order to generate a new narrative. I explore my identity in the places where I’ve lived and project myself into them, trying to find answers.
Where do you get your inspiration?
Revisiting reflections from the past from a distance can help resolve some of the key issues of our existence. Life is like an unfinished novel. We reread those chapters left unresolved. We return to them for a new interpretation. As we mature, the signs and signals of the past evolve their meanings. Emotions also endure over the years. And we find more cause for reflection in those places where the echo of our presence in earlier times still lingers.
Who are your influences?
The list of photographers who have moved me on occasion is very long, but I can point to a few that are more present in my memory. I think that as the years have passed, my own personal evolution has caused my tastes to fluctuate. But I could name a few: Gregory Crewdson, Nicolas Dhervillers, Corine Mercader, Ellen Kooi, Yorgos Yatromanokalis, Elena Helfrecht, Teri Varhol, Dylan Hausthor, Paul Guilmoth, Eugene Smith. I would add the novelist Haruki Murakami, who has been with me for a long time. I have recognized myself in his characters. Solitary and thoughtful, their lives unfold in parallel worlds where reality and fiction blur in a halo of mystery and strangeness.
What determines the subject matter you choose?
My first series all have in common a mental connection to a place, a personal period, or an emotion that has marked my life. A representation in images that brings me closer to this way of feeling. Sometimes it can be something deeply connected to my childhood or adolescence. But little by little, I move outward, from this inner core toward a different dialogue with reality. I find it interesting that the impulse of some latent image in my imagination can be the driving force that
initiates a creative process. However, for now, I’m open to exploring foreign themes in places far from my own territory, which allows me to step outside my comfort zone and, in the process, try other photographic aesthetics. I believe that the photographic gaze will maintain certain formal parameters that will keep my personal style recognizable in future visual proposals.
What impact would you like your art to have?
That someone feels reflected or connects with some part of their past or present self when looking at my photographs. As has often happened to me with images by many visual artists. I believe that’s why I chose photography as a form of expression. The greatest emotion arises when I recognize myself in the image, and it challenges me to delve deeper into my existence. When the author, speaking about themselves, connects us with our own selves. Photographs that refer us to the sensitive fragments of our essence as people. Where the images seem to silently point to us, whisper to us, and capture us.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
The video art works of my hometown artist Francisco Ruiz de Infante and his exhibition “Transit Center for Adolescents.” The contemporary dance companies La Intrusa, Kidd Pivot, and the Electric Company Theatre, among others. Any visual representation of the Tower of Babel.
Is there anything you want to add?
Congratulations on your digital magazine. It’s a (great) visual reference for browsing and reading.

Where Fireflies Unfold
Project statement

Deleitosa is my village. It is located in the province of Cáceres, in the region of Extremadura in Spain. Here my parents, grandparents, great grandparents and other ancestors were born, going back through centuries of family genealogy. Deleitosa was the village that Eugene Smith chose to realize in his photographic essay “Spanish Village” that was published in the American magazine Life on April 9, 1951.

Far from showing the perceptible appearance of Deleitosa or some of the visual references linked to what was a photographic icon of the social and economic backwardness in Spanish rural society, my gaze has some subjective nuances linked to a series of experiences, places and personal memories. Reminiscences that have endured as apparitions in my memory. Images that intermingle episodes that float in my imaginary with the new realities that coexist in the village.

There is an emotional need to reflect on the territory of which we are part. To explore our identity in the echo of the places that still speak to us, or in the absence-presence of the people and beings that inhabit them. To form a visual interpretation that evokes the mystery that manifests itself in everyday rhythms, in the poetic condition that underlies the strange.

oskar alvarado
@oskaralvarado.photography