Rafa Fernandez

Rafa Fernández - New York - 2008

Técnica: Analog photography

Biografía del Artista: Originally from the city of Liège (Belgium), where he was born in 1966, Rafa Fernández has an extensive career behind him, having worked for years with “Espacio Foto” (Madrid) and “El Arte de lo Imposible” (Gijón). He has also had solo exhibitions at Mediadvanced (Gijón) and at the SegoviaFoto Festival at the Palacio de Quintanar. He has been part of numerous collective exhibitions, including those of several editions of the Hablando en Plata Festival. His latest collective exhibition El gran libro del mundo. Una década de fotografía en Asturias was presented at the Juan Barjola Museum (Gijón) in April 2021. Also in 2021 he inaugurated American Way a solo exhibition at the Antiguo Instituto Jovellanos in Gijón. In her work, photography and travel go hand in hand. Her words are definitive in this regard: “I have read that Annie Leibovitz remembered the long car trips with her family, going to the different destinations of her military father. She commented that the frame of the car window was her frame long before she had a camera in her hands. The same thing happened to me, through the window of my father's Beetle I got used to seeing the world as we crossed half of Europe from my native Belgium to return to Asturias for vacation.” Although he has travelled widely around the world and has notable works from countries such as Japan, his weakness is the United States. Perhaps it has to do with his varied musical and artistic references, all of them directly linked to this nation: jazz and blues; the photography of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston, among many others; and the hyperrealist painting of the second half of the 20th century by authors such as John Baeder or Richard Estes.

INVITATION TO THE TRIP “We discover after years of struggle that we do not make a journey: it makes us. Guides, programs, reservations, things that are obligatory and inevitable, sink and founder in the personality of the journey.” John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America, 1962 Gautier said that the pleasure of travel consists in going, not in arriving. Rafa Fernández conceives the journey in this way, as an experience in which the important thing is the route traveled and recorded through photography understood as a periegesis not written but visual. His snapshots reconstruct a personal American topography of human types, street scenes, roads, cars, gas stations, cafes, hotels... An inventory of the territories traveled. Carmelo Vega, in his essay Tourist logics of photography, reflects on how photography and the travel experience go hand in hand: “Photographic journeys were conceived as journeys of truth: the photographic image thus reconstructed the image of the world. To photograph was to see again. But also to see in an orderly way: planning and structuring the gaze like a file, methodically placing things in their place, indicating their exact location, determining their importance. In short, cataloging places, cultures, individuals, objects.” Travelling is learning. In 1960, John Steinbeck discovered that he did not know his own country and, together with his dog Charley, he began a long journey through the United States. On Rafa Fernández's travels, his companion is a Leica M6 that seems to shoot to the rhythm of blues or jazz. Steinbeck himself wrote that “a journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.” And so it happens in his photography. New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Memphis, Nashville and Coney Island, among other places. Each one with its own personality, with its own temperament. The American Way series takes the viewer’s imagination to the American planet through images that are nourished by musical, literary, pictorial (hyperrealism of John Baeder or Richard Estes) and, of course, photographic references. The list echoes Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston… The list is as long as “long are the journeys that America requires” in the words of Stephen Shore. Text: Natalia Alonso Arduengo