Alfredo Cáliz

Alfredo Cáliz

Photographer of people,
places and things

Text by Gregorio Apesteguía.

Explanation of the subject.

The photographer lives in a village. He travels around a lot. I think that in 2011 the photographer will be 43 or 42. A year or so ago he started talking to people close to him to take pictures of him. People in his closest circle. 

I have been one of those who have gone in his car to the place where he takes the photographs.

The day I went, he invited us to breakfast. The photo was secondary to the fact that I could have breakfast on a proper terrace on a summer’s day. The photographer was driving his car that morning, stopped for petrol and took us to his studio. The place is a bit run down and the toilet is half clogged, but they seem to be doing relevant works there.

Once at the crime scene, he said to me: “Look here, don’t smile, don’t get distracted, focus your eyes on this spot and put on the T-shirt I told you to bring”. I could see that he was handling a series of parameters with certain guarantees. When the session was over, an organised activity with a certain degree of seriousness, he told us to take his car, given that he had a second car in Madrid, and went to buy some cokes. He doesn’t explain, I thought, he’s looking for something and now he’s going to buy cokes.

A few days before, I had told the photographer that some of the people photographed, among whom I am going to appear now, look depressed. I had also told him that it is good to have a coherent opinion on major international issues, but perhaps now, at this stage of our lives, more than ever, we should recognise that we are eternal apprentices of love and dedicate our most sincere poems to it.

With all this, it seems that the photographer aspires to make an ideal and therapeutic album of stickers, an album based on a classification, an order, an order of which he himself is a part. The zoo he is trying to recreate is made up of members of his environment, those who provide him with the immediacy of his being there.

Edita 2 sardinas
COLECCIÓN EXCEPCIONES
Artista y Palmero
Photographs by Alfredo Cáliz
Texts by Gregorio Apesteguía
Graphic design. Ana Inés
Casasnovas, La Rana gráfica.
Digitalisation and image processing: Negromate ediciones S.L.
Printing: Gráficas Palermo