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Editorial RM 2025
- Hardback, 1st edition, 96p
- New
When I was starting out I could experiment and take risks. That is when I most enjoyed mywork as a photographer. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that I produced my best work attimes when I felt that I was still learning, that I was a beginner. Once I thought I knew what I needed to do and applied it to various subjects, I lost that freshness and sense of surprise: I had to secure the results and could no longer experiment in the same way. Throughout my fifty-five years as a photographer I have beena beginner several times: when I wanted to learn how to take portraits, when I started to work in colour, or when I took my first photographs of wild horses.
In 1968, at the age of twenty-two, I was studying Business Administration in Germany,but after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Spanish photographs I decided that I wouldbecome a photographer instead of a businessman. I had left Spain because I didn’t wantto do the compulsory military service under the Franco dictatorship, so I had to return toSpain with my tail between my legs, ready to do the military service after all. There were no photography schools at the time, and I learnt by pounding the streets in the town of Cuenca, while waiting to begin my military service, four years older than my fellow recruits. I worked for four hours in the morning and another four in the afternoon, following theopening hours of shops and offices. Children would follow me on the street, asking to have their picture taken; at that time taking pictures of children was considered perfectly normal. When it was time to go to boot camp I smuggled in a small Leica IIIf (from 1953 and still without a film advance lever) and took pictures surreptitiously. Had I been caught I would still be behind bars. After my military service I started to get to know Spain and I also took a trip to Yugoslavia with my first wife. Later, when she was offered a scholarship at theLondon School of Economics, we left for London. I started collaborating with agencies and magazines and could no longer be considered a beginner.
This book contains the images which taught me how to be a photographer. Now I wish I could feel like a beginner again, not to make myself younger, (although that would be good too), but to regain the sense of experimentation, discovery, adventure, and transcendence which drove my work at the time.
C. H.
