HERNÁN CASTRO

Apr 26

I am Hernán Castro, from the city of Calera located in the central zone of Chile. I’ve been doing street photography since 2020 in the cities of Calera and Quilota. Previously, I was doing a lot of experimental photography.

When and where did you start photographing? Who has been the reference for your photography?

HC: Since I was a child, photography without carrying out the intrinsic act of photographing has always caught my attention. I always remember my aunt with her photographic and video camera at family parties. I also remember a couple of times when he took his camera and secretly took photos. Undoubtedly, those were the first approaches that, at the age of 25, were carried out in the first place digitally with a mobile phone. Yes, I always had the idea of analog photography, but I thought it was already an extinct mode or medium. I found out, and I realized that it still existed. I bought a Smena 6 Lomography camera and started doing doubles and multiples analog exposures. I have always looked for a way to express what I feel, I looked for it in music, in poetry, but in photography, I found an ideal niche for myself.

Who has been the reference for your photography?

HC: Although I started with multiple analog exposures, the first thing that caught my attention (I can say that this has just changed now) was post-World War II Japanese photography. Daido Moriyama, Tomatsu, Nakahira, Araki, Fukase, Suda, among others. Nowadays and in this period in which I go out to shoot, I am daily consuming photography by Jeff Mermelstein, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Pinkhassov, Bruce Gilden, Mark Cohen, Daniel Arnold, and Patrick Pagnano, among others.

What do you want to convey through your images?

HC: It is impressive what you see being aware of what the street is. The street is the social thermometer of the community's situation at a given moment. The street is also the place where you can find and spend everything.

At first, with my photography, I mixed reality with dream images. Photography has created places that don't exist and that you can only find in dreams, but that did seem genuine.

Now I try to show the very particular society of a specific place. For the rest, we live in neighboring cities, and we share cultures and origins, every place has its particularities, presented on the street, where you can meet someone you may never see again. Situations can occur in unique and unrepeatable moments. I communicate individual and unrepeatable moments.

“Now I try to show the very particular society of a specific place. For the rest, we live in neighboring cities, and we share cultures and origins, every place has its particularities, presented on the street, where you can meet someone you may never see again. Situations can occur in unique and unrepeatable moments. I communicate individual and unrepeatable moments”

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

HC: I use photography to escape and heal my lack of social interactions. For a couple of years, I've struggled against the feeling of not wanting to be on the street. At one point in my life, I suffered a panic attack, leading me to spend a couple of years locked up and away from the street and fighting shyness. Being in front of a person and taking a photograph is a great escape from my most antisocial feelings. That the person I am photographing does the act of looking at me is a deep struggle against my feelings of not wanting to have that visual and social contact. Not only do I have aspirations or problems, but it is a transversal characteristic of the human being. I went from photographing my dreams to waking up and capturing the social reality and the particularities of those around me.I am conquering my fears, taking my camera everywhere and shooting everywhere.