Interview #492: Edra Galzeran
q: Give a short introduction of yourself:
a: My name is Edra Galzeran, I am a photographer from Terrassa, a small town near Barcelona. In my teenage years this industrial city had little appeal for an awakened mind; it was just a place to run away from. So It was then that I started my escapades to Barcelona, a place where things happened. I left the calmness of my town, to plunge into the excitement, the madness of the city. At some point Barcelona also began to feel smaller and so began a long journey of ten years during which I had the opportunity to live in ever larger cities such as Berlin, Moscow and Kiev with the exception of Venice.
In the meantime, I studied Translation and Interpreting and began to take photographs and paint. All these cities fascinated me and still do, probably because they are places where the West meets the East. It’s funny how now, some years later, I have changed the excitement by the silence since I now live in a small town. In a way, I have returned to my origins. Now I love the closeness to nature, the Waldeisamkeit, being alone and wonderful in the forest.
q: How has the past year been for you?
a: This terrible year was undoubtedly a turning point for me in many ways. On the one hand, the calm caused by the confinement, the slowing down of work, gave me the opportunity to become a de facto photographer, to show my work to the world. I have always photographed, but I could say that the germination of my capacity as a photographer is in Ukraine because there I started to really “see”. I bought my first SRL camera and started to walk and photograph what was around me, what caught my attention even If I did not think about becoming a photographer at that time. Things would start later, a few years after I returned to Barcelona in 2008. I had a lot of material that I had collected over the years, I did a workshop on analog photography and at that time I started to imagine the idea of becoming a photographer. I certainly already was, but it’s always difficult to say it out loud, when you are self-taught. Later it was difficult to find time to make a website, etc, because of my work, because of time constraints. However during the confinement I had to stay at home and had a lot of time to work on my new career.
On the other hand, this year has shown the fragility of human beings and our way of life has changed completely. The Covid has equaled us all more or less in disgrace. I personally was not affected by the disease, nor was anyone around me, although I had to face a family tragedy that kept me on my toes for almost three months.
q: What is your series “Immram” about?
a: The word “Immram” is an old Irish word that usually means “journey”. At the same time it is the name of a kind of story from Irish literature. These stories are about the sea voyage of a hero to the Otherworld. They were mostly written in the Christian era (8th century), but still preserve elements of Irish mythology.
Immrams focus on the exploits of heroes in their search for the Otherworld, which in these cases is located on the westernmost islands of Ireland. The hero sets out on his journey to experience adventure or fulfill his destiny and usually stops at other fantastic islands before reaching his destination.
My project Immram is a journey into the Otherworld, to my own Otherworld, it is a journey between past and present, between truth and fiction, between paganism and Christianity. It is my winter journey to an old, hostile island in the west of Ireland, where all kinds of beliefs are permeable. It is the smallness of man in the face of a nature steeped in fatalism.
q: In your series “Flor de marge”, you revisited photos you took more than a decade ago in Ukraine. What was the process like for you and what did you rediscover? Do you feel you photograph differently now?
a: It was all part of the same process of creating myself as a photographer. During this slow period of confinement, I began to look at the material I had produced over the years, but it also brought to mind all the forgotten photos that I had taken in Ukraine. It was a surprise to discover that I was already a photographer back then. I found some interesting pictures. When I looked at them, it was like seeing the person I was ten years ago. It was very revealing. I saw the gaze I had then; I saw a harsh reality that unfortunately is shaping our days more and more, at least in Spain.
As for photography, things are quite different today. Paradoxically at a time when everyone shamelessly exposes their private lives in the social media, no one wants to be photographed in the street. I do not think that is so terrible. I remember a time when I lived in the middle of Barcelona, in the Gothic quarter, near the Plaça Real, and dozens and dozens of tourists were loitering around. I often heard the click of the camera, and probably I will be seen in many pictures with my always loving red scarf.
Today I photograph differently; I have shifted the street photography of my beginnings in favour of introspective photography. People are becoming more and more inaccessible, at least in Western countries and it is difficult to capture these special moments. When you have to ask for permission, all the magic of the moment disappears. But there is one wonderful exception, I am thinking now of Katty Grannan, a photographer who does great portraits of people on the street who want to be photographed. My new projects are more oriented towards nature, maybe because I now live two minutes away from the forest. They are more introspective, the human presence has become more residual.
q: You mentioned that you are also a painter. Do you see a link between your photography and painting?
a: Perhaps in the dominance of strong contrasts and in a certain tendency, especially in more recent works, towards pessimism, in line with the times, although I am a rather cheerful person in my everyday life. In any case, I believe that I am in a phase of experimentation in both photography and painting.
q: Upcoming projects or ideas?
a: I have several projects in mind, but the most advanced is “Cal y silencio” (Lime and silence). This project deals with the phenomenon of depopulation of rural areas in Spain. The centre of Spain is a vast plateau that covers most of the national territory, a place with extreme temperatures both in winter and in summer, where only the 15% of the population live in the 53 % of the territory. In recent decades there has been a migration to the major cities of the periphery and to the capital, Madrid. The rural world in Spain is a forgotten world full of dying villages, solitude, isolation, lime and silence.
q: Any music to recommend?
a: That is a pretty difficult question, because I listen to very different music from all times, from different styles and from many, many countries. Depending on my mood, I listen to music from Schubert’s Winterrreise to Ravi Shankar, from The Doors to Bon Iver, from Chavela Vargas to Mina…I have long Spotify playlists that I like to play randomly. I also enjoy the discoveries of this platform, the last one yesterday, a Turkish version of the Russian song “Podmoskovnie Vechera” (Moscow nights) by Tülay German.
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