Alejandro Maestre

The medium a photographer is working with is light. Understanding light is a the heart of the art of photography. The Spanish photographer Alejandro Maestre Gasteazi was teaching lighting at Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, while studying for his BA in photography. He graduated in 1999 and has since then continued to teach, while also working as a professional photographer. His portfolio is wide-ranging, from natural places and people to studio-based work with models. He founded CitizenPixel in 2003, a company working with commercial photography and graphic design with customers including for example Audi and Burberry.

In his work “EL HOMBRE QUE SE CREA” (2010) he showing his fluency with all current digital tools and techniques - as well as his masterful use of lighting. This is probably his most excellent work to date, a portrait series of his friend Julián Cánovas who appears to emerge out of thin air as a pair of hands shaping and sculpting almost his entire body.  For this series, Alejandro Maestre used advanced digital chroma-key technique and tools. Normally, chroma-key (popularly called green-screen or blue-screen) is used for making part of a scene disappear and later to be overlaid by other imagery. In this portrait series, the opposite was explored as the model gradually covered himself with blue mud  and by doing so, gradually becoming visible. What makes these photographs particularly convincing is the digitally created selective drop-shadow that has been added to the background, which gives the images a better feeling of depth. The gestures of the model, the sculptor Julián Cánovas, are also important for the almost tactile sensitivity of the images.

The underlying narrative in this portrait series is also fascinating. Several mythologies use the idea that the first humans were mad from mud. For example in Greek mythology Prometheus shaped man out of mud, and Athena breathed life into the clay figure. In the portrait series, we see man being shaped by himself, which perhaps corresponds to a more contemporary cosmology.