[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n her book On Photography, Susan Sontag claims photography, “like every mass art form, is not practiced by most people as art.” Taking a careful look at GirosYAndares (Turns and Wanderings), the softcover art book by Manizales-born photographer Carlos Pineda, it is evident that he is a craftsman of the lens, thinking-out moments and elevating his black and white images to the level of art.
Pineda is a rare exception among contemporaries, who in line with Sontag’s claim, use photography more as a “social rite” than a document of the human condition.
Cartier-Bresson mastered the French eye. Robert Capa our look on the world. Pineda, one could claim, has the acute Colombian eye, capturing subjects not with the paternalist vantage of an outsider, but at their level, tapping into emotions despite the absence of dialogue.
From a grainy morning scene along the St. Lawrence River in Montreal, to an afternoon sand cloud in the hills near Tu?querres, Narin?o department, Carlos is a self-confessed “nomad,” managing to take in the emotions of both place and peoples.
His story as a photographer begins in the coffee highlands of his native Caldas. After studying business administration and working in a city bank, he headed to Concordia University in Montreal and graduated with a degree in Design Art.
The influence of design is prevalent in Pineda’s GirosYAndares. From the lines of intense black shadows to the geometry of public spaces, the photography puts people within their natural context.
While developing his long-term photo projects in Colombia’s eastern Llanos and close to home in the coffee region, Pineda shoots commercial work for book publishers, magazines and newspapers.
His portfolio was selected for the 2010 edition of Fotoespan?a and he has received several grants to capture Colombia’s unique patrimony and the daily lives of farmers in a rapidly changing economic landscape.
Pineda continues to travel to Canada where he participates in photography workshops at Guelph University and York University in Toronto.
Felipe London?o in the preface of GirosYAndares writes: “Either in the mountains of Colombia, or at the remote locations of the continent, his photographs redraw reality to make us see concepts translated into forms.”
While form and light are protagonists in every image, Pineda is an invisible participant of events unfolding around him.
In one striking image, captured in the town of Estella, Spain, local farmers break bread in a rustic cottage. The light is faint and moment intimate.
In Chincheros, Peru, a wedding party of humble peasants is showered in confetti. The image once again reveals Pineda’s capacity to be the inconspicuous observer.
Pineda is not a war photographer, but a social documentarian moving from experience to experience, be it a wedding party in the high Andes or a candlelight funeral among the Maya.
GirosYAndares is a treasure of a book. It offers a close and personal look at the work of a Colombian photographer who has mastered his eye and can execute powerful photo essays in color.
Changes in photographic technology have not posed a threat nor limitations for Pineda to shoot “old style” — framing and editing his images with a lens rather than the latest software. And it shows in this masterful and unpretentious book by a photographer whose pictures are all about empathy and a deep respect of others.
The book is now available in specialty book stores in Bogota?: Arteletra, La Valija de Fuego, San Librario, La Madriguera del Conejo and Luvina.
