DAVID SÁNCHEZ

I am David Sánchez, a student and photographer living in the city of Manizales, Colombia. Photography is currently the center of my life and I try to make immersion in the processes a determining factor in my work; an act that ultimately calls for political involvement and is something I need to live. Also, with her I like to erase the limits and produce consciously hybrid work of an interdisciplinary nature. Of the possibilities that photography offers me to understand the world we have created, the way we have decided to inhabit it is the one that I value the most, in addition to having an attraction to beauty in the wild and a desire to show my world, without glorifying or glamorizing it.

When and where did you start photographing?

DS: I started photographing when I was 15 years old in the small town where I was born, as well as alternating it with video. But it wasn't until I got to know analog photography and punk at the age of 17 that I began to take photography seriously, and I built myself from my curiosities, instincts and interest in order to find in it a way of narrating and telling stories.

Who has been the reference of your photography?

DS: My referents are going to come all the time and move between different artistic expressions, such as graffiti, painters, music and the street itself. But if we focus on my photographic references Diana Arbus and Nan goldin changed my way of understanding the photographic act, without ignoring others such as Larry Clark, Nikki S. Lee and Bruce Gilden who have forged in me a kind of radicalism that precedes to the photograph itself.

What do you want to communicate through your photographs?

DS: Photography at this time in my life is the distillation of all that conforms and contradicts me (philias, phobias, fetishes) it is then the way in which, through photographic language, my head understands the world with others, how I feel them intimately as part of oneself, something that ultimately calls for an involvement that is not very passive. That is why an intention in my photos is to show them alive, so that it is noted that behind that camera there is a photographer who lives with intensity, that it is not simply about the game of knowing how to take a photograph, but that there is a pulsating photographer behind that camera, who he is leaving his blood, his very being, which seeks not only to arouse emotions, but to express them.

What does street and documentary photography mean to you?

DS: Street photography is a state of mind, it is a decision that is made before going out, with it we can de-trivialize the places we pass through and merge with them, like salt in water and go after that unpredictable nature of human being, his spontaneity and trying to represent something of reality in a rhythm of lines, surfaces and values, but not before having absorbed it.

How are your life experiences reflected in the subjects we see in your photographs?

DS: I take photographs because I necessarily like art and more precisely painting, and it is in it that symbols take on a leading role, something that I like to transfer to my photographs. The symbols then are like reminiscent of memory that are in turn a fundamental part of allegorical elements of the people who have allowed me to be photographed. In this sense, symbols are more than simple objects or representations, I consider them an important part to delve into the trifles and reconstruct stories anchored in everyday life, but which in turn have nuances of fantasy, subjectivity and wonder.

LIDY AGUILA

JOÃO PEDRO LIMA