Indago

It doesn't happen often to be confronted with a book that breaks through the barrier of the pages sewn behind a cover, and becomes an object of expression, a systematic collection that goes beyond images and words, and assumes a configuration of feelings and moods. Even less – especially in times like these, where printed paper is becoming a niche (think international newspapers such as Newsweek downsizing their existence online) – to find dimension in a book; not pocket sized gems with tissue paper pages, enriched by their smallness anymore, but porous and thick images as the paper/prop that holds them, just to emphasize the photographs' multilayers that reconstruct a forest, perhaps more emotional than physical.

Yurian Quintanas, a Dutch-born Spanish photographer in his early thirties, honed his studies at the IDEP of Barcelona, specializing in photojournalism and winning numerous awards and contests in the following years. He later established in Catalonia, where he currently works and carries out his photographic research, which seems to follow from afar a quote of the text by Henry David Thoreau, Walden: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

His monochrome photographs are diving free in the depths of nature, they are full of blacks and charged with a mute pathos, reflecting his intentions of recording, but with a dramatic note; to deify flora and fauna, elevating them with new visual interpretations, watching the ever-present human hand, amending, creeping, surviving, and sometimes hindering. Nature and man are merged into viscous nights – when the life of the book seems to take place – in these hazy chiaroscuro, graphic-like almost, as if in the merger of the imbued black he wants to emphasize the contours, the boundaries that separate all things.

"The mountain always looks majestic from a distance, but what happens if I get closer?"

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