The committed author runs a sentimental risk when giving expression to other people’s realities: the action of portraying a parallel world requires absorbing, making your own a reality that belongs to another in order to fix it forever.
The eagerness to treat man as an individual, in this commitment that consists of representing him as a person, the photographer who aspires to straight photography, ends up witnessing an alteration in his/her perception of their own surroundings.
This is how when conceiving a project for a subsidy from the autonomous government of Andalucia which enabled me to pay for high-performance photographic equipment, I chose a site within easy reach: the beach of La Malagueta in Malaga, capital of the touristic Costa del Sol, the seaside place on the Mediterranean Sea where I spent many summers during my infancy.
Malagueta’s beach is an extension of the urban area of the city of Malaga itself. That is why the population that goes there: families with children, old-age pensioners and groups of teenagers , represents a population of a more or less low income level who are unable to own a private vehicle in order to get to more distant beaches.
Since the early days when I began to take photographs in Malagueta, and while studying the images taken during each day at night on the computer screen, I drew the conclusion that my photographs were not captivating enough. The problem in fact was that the light in summer in this area is so white that the skies hardly seem blue at all.
I hurriedly perfected a lighting system using flash and filtering of this light which, coupled with a second filtering during the NEF developing, enabled me to obtain very natural-looking skin tones and also a vivid blue background. On occasions, the middle distance area or even certain areas of the background sky appeared to be too blue, so I then went on to desaturate them, which invested the image with greater depth.
The problem with this technique which has arisen is that on firing the flash at full power, given the intensity of the natural light in the area , the flash took a long time to recharge so that it was not possible for me to take several consecutive shots. The result is is a anthropologic portrait of the population that go to this beach in the summertime.