Francisco Ubilla
Street photography work where the obsessive composition and the vividness of the colors try to play with each other to give a harmonic and geometric visual journey between the daily life of Chile and Spain.
Street photography work where the obsessive composition and the vividness of the colors try to play with each other to give a harmonic and geometric visual journey between the daily life of Chile and Spain.
“Geometric Corners” is a work of street photography that seeks simplicity in urban settings and shows that unnoticed interaction we have with our environment. Thanks to the rush of our day to day, we do not realize that we are surrounded by geometries and balances, this work being a search for those small and fleeting moments of harmony.
Honorific Mention at the SIPA Contest. Ā© Francisco Ubilla
The images presented on this occasion have been made in Chile and Spain, as a proposal for cultural rapprochement between both nations through a street photography of obsessive frames and full of color. In it, they show how the forms of the city interact with people and how in just a few moments of precision, visual harmonies can be created that we can find around any neighborhood corner.
It is a work that is constantly evolving, put together for an exhibition at Casa de AmĆ©rica, in Madrid, and where you can find photographs taken in various places in both countries: the Santiago and Madrid subways, Mapocho Avenue in Santiago or the neighborhood of Santa Catalina in Palma de Mallorca, among others. However, not only can they be understood alone, but they maintain a narrative line with each other. The photo taken outside a supermarket in Santiago, for example, where some women await the imminent arrival of a bus, has a dialogue built through the lines and geometry with an image made in the Mosque-Cathedral of CĆ³rdoba; this, in turn, continues the dialogue with a man who cleaners the Plaza de Armas in Santiago, culminating this entire visual journey in a firefighter’s faucet into which a dog could not urinate.
On the other hand, they are images that also speak to us about the everyday from the content, the composition and the points of view. This is how we see a grandfather walking towards a man with his son or a grandmother writing a simple letter, which crosses lines with a strawberry umbrella walking down a street. We also have some caged pigeons that allude to our lives when we compare them with some people climbing the stairs of the Santiago metro; and so on.
In the end, this exhibition is put together like a puzzle, where the pieces, regardless of their place of origin, fit together in a photographic collective that has its own strength from the group, but whose essence comes from the individual energy that emerges from each image.
It is, after all, a journey, a visual journey through those small and fleeting moments of harmony that we have with the environment and that are intertwined with the shapes and colors that successively run through the geometric corners of our neighborhoods.
About the Author:
Francisco Ubilla is a Chilean photojournalist. He studied journalism at the Diego Portales University in Chile and has a Master’s degree in Art and Technical Photography from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. He has been a Press Advisor for the Cervantes Institute in Stockholm and today he is a collaborating photojournalist for media such as El PaĆs and Associated Press in Mallorca, Balearic Islands, where he has lived for 4 years and where he is also a professor of photojournalism at the University of Alberta Gimenez. In Chile, he is a collaborating professor at the Alberto Hurtado University.
He has been awarded First Place for Chile at the Sony World Photography Award, Finalist for the SIPA Award and the Travel Photographer Society, and Honorable Mention at the International Photography Award. He also has a scholarship from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile, DIRAC, for the artistic creation of Chileans abroad.
He has made and participated in individual and group exhibitions in places such as London, Beijing, Shanghai, Stockholm, Kuala Lumpur, Madrid, Valencia, Palma de Mallorca, Bilbao, Santiago de Chile and ValparaĆso.
Equipment:
- Cameras: Canon 7D, Sony A6000
- Optics: Sigma 17-50mm 2.8
Websites:
