We present a series of portraits of anonymous people where their faces do not appear, “faceless portraits”. With the prevailing pose in our society, the spontaneity of portrait expressing the real gesture has been lost.  It is said that we are at a historic moment in which image prevails, but perhaps we are saturated and stunned by the excess of over-controlled, artificial and processed images to adapt them to current social standards.

However, we could say that everything is controlled. We pretend a gesture but the rest of our body can be free to express a reality that we cannot make up.

This exhibition suggests a narrative from a photographic language based on fragments. Gestures and details are not noticed by their protagonists, who become models without feeling observed, and fragmentary and incomplete pictures force the viewer to imagine the context and deepen the story.
    
The fragment as a discursive element requires us to be active and thoughtful readers. Pictures can speak by themselves but an interlocutor is always needed for there to be dialogue, and these incomplete pictures require interpretation, making our observation slower and deeper.  The viewer must imagine a context engaging in that situation.

 

Andrés Castillo

 

 

 

 

© Andrés Castillo

 

 

Andrés Castillo Valero (1955) is a professional photographer settled in Valencia. He started his career in 1974, in the regional centre of RTVE (Spanish Radio and Television Corporation) in Valencia as film and laboratory technician. He also worked as freelance for several media and was a founding member and responsible for the photography area of the magazine “7 Días”. He was member of IMÁGENES 3, a group of cultural upheaval, with whom he made several exhibitions and performances.

 

From the eighties and for 27 years, he has served as responsible for the photography area of the Department of Culture of the Valencian Government. During these years he has exhibited and participated in several projects including “Món i Misteri de la Festa”, an exhibition on the Mystery Play of Elche which was opened in the Llotja de la Seda in València and exhibited also in the Sala del Tinell in Barcelona and the Academy of Spain in Rome.

He is the author of the slideshow of the Rooms 1 and 2 of the Museum of Valltorta and also of the Documentary Collection of such museum. In 2006, he presented the exhibition “Barra libre” in the Sala La Gallera in Valencia. Four pictures of this series are now part of the Collection of IVAM (Valencian Institute of Modern Art).

 

Throughout his career, Andrés Castillo has worked on digital and analogue, with particular attention to photographic reports and portraits.