SECRET STORY Rafa Fernández 06.09 - 27.10.23

 

Secret Story brings together the latest works of photographer Rafa Fernández (Liege, Belgium, 1966).

In his work, photography and travel go hand in hand . Her words are defining in this regard: “ I have read that Annie Leibovitz remembered the long car trips with her family, traveling to the different destinations of her military father. He commented that the frame of the car window was his frame long before he had a camera in his hands. The same thing happened to me, through the window of my father's Beetle I got used to seeing the world while we crossed half of Europe from my native Belgium to return to Asturias for vacation."

Although he has traveled around the world and has notable works from countries like Japan, his weakness is the United States. Perhaps it has to do with its varied musical and artistic references, all of them directly linked to this nation: jazz and blues; the photography of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston, among many others; and the hyperrealist painting of the second half of the 20th century by authors such as John Baeder or Richard Estes.

Traveling is knowing. In 1960, John Steinbeck discovered that he did not know his own country and, together with his dog Charley, began a long journey through American lands. On Rafa Fernández's travels, his companion is a Leica M6 that seems to shoot to the rhythm of blues or jazz. Steinbeck himself wrote that “a journey is a person in itself; No two are the same" . And so it happens in his photography. New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Memphis, Nashville and Coney Island, among other places. Each one with their own personality, with their own temperament. (Invitation to the trip, Natalia Alonso, 2021).