The work of the self-taught photographer Salem McBunny (Jalisco, 1993) has a touch of fantasy, a surreal aesthetic, and an essence of pictorial texture. The artist, who has won in the Fashion category of the 2018 Master Class Awards, has exhibited at the Soumaya Museum or at the Foto Septiembre Festival in the United States, is focused on the workshops he teaches, presenting his book Salem’s Eye and preparing his second photographic installment.
His professional journey has not been easy, because despite the fact that photography was part of his life since he was little, modeling first for his sister and then being the one to take the camera, he had to face at the same time with a problem that would help him to channeling their emotions through photography: accepting that they had low self-esteem.
The creation of the image has been “something therapeutic,” he confesses in an interview. But how did she find out? “On one occasion some ladies asked me: ‘Why do you take the photos you do, or what’s the point?’ My response was that it was very therapeutic, so I invited them to try it and feel what it felt like. From that experience they invited me to give photography workshops as emotional therapy in different institutions for vulnerable groups”.
The closeness and acceptance of emotions led him to express through his social networks that he did not like what he saw in the mirror, and he confessed to his followers that he felt bad, despite the fact that his therapeutic work had long “me I kept feeling bad with what I was seeing, with what I was hearing, so I externalized it and at that moment I received many messages from people sharing how they felt, and I realized that I had a message to convey and that’s how it came about. Salem’s eye.
Salem McBunny, who primarily shoots portrait images, is planning his next book: “It will be about pictorial photography and I want to focus on all the tricky issues you encounter as a photographer when starting out, creating, and the complexity of defining your style: for where to go, what can work for you more or less. I plan to direct it to the photographic part ”.
Black and white is a constant in portrait photography. It’s not your case…
I love the colour! I have studied color, the basics of color psychology, chromatic chords and the chromatic circle. I have realized that color plays an extremely important role in what I do because I generate visual impact through color. I visually seek for the viewer to intentionally take their gaze to certain elements, but for there to be harmony.
Why do you decide that your images have pictorial characteristics?
I realized that with Photoshop I could create things that reality wouldn’t allow me, and that was incredible, because I said: I don’t want to do what the photographic studios around me are doing, I want to do something different and make what I want possible. be in my head; Another thing is that since I was little I have problems with my eyes, because where I live I had my season of planting fertilizer for corn, cutting corn, planting beans, and throughout my childhood my eyes suffered a lot, until one day I was about to lose my sight and practically stopped being one hundred percent in contact with the field. My eyes made me uncomfortable, but I fell in love with highlighting their color, but also changing them, putting heterochromia on them. The question of whether it looks like a painting or a photograph is something that has enchanted me; years ago it was an incredible criticism that you changed, for example, the color of people’s eyes, and today people like it.
What do you think of today looking for that?
I enjoy it very much and I am excited that they give me the freedom to put more in, instead of thinking about taking it away.
Isn’t it easy to fall into false perfectionism?
There is something very interesting and curious that I read in a book by Elizabeth Gilbert, Unleash your magic, which says that the worst mistake we make is to obsess over perfection, and I have worked on two things, and that is that at first I wanted my work to be perfectly polished and clean outside; then I chose to take advantage of the details in a matter of people or in a matter of my work.
I remember that at some point I came across models who didn’t like their freckles and asked me to remove them, or make them a little whiter or make them thinner or remove a scar, but before my eyes I saw them as beautiful. When I photographed them and gave that pictorial atmosphere to the image, they were suddenly surprised by the result of my work. There is no perfect thing.
And also
A process of self-discovery
Salem’s Eye is divided into four chapters: the part of self-healing, blockages, inspiration and love. In it, he involved his followers and captured not only his images, but also his story about the process of discovering that he had androphobia, as well as other experiences he has gone through. He asked his followers to share words “that motivate them in their lives, and I captured them all in the book; I also asked them for some photographs where they captured an emotion, something that was important to them”.
jk
2023-05-06 13:48:17
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