Fortunately, everything that gives me pleasure and provides me with this feeling of peace and calm is related to my animal instincts and that is why my search begins with nature. I try to understand my existence, searching for little pieces of the landscape that might represent my mood, my feelings, my own self.

I set out to perceive and photograph perception.

I’m doing this exercise at a time in my life when I am full of rage, helplessness, pent-up fury and an unbelievable tameness which is not typical of me at all. The search begins among the masses of colour, its limits and the supposed visual chaos that rules in the ‘natural order’ of things.

Experience forms a part of the work intrinsically.

The hours spent driving for miles searching for bits of landscapes that provide a true reflection of the experience itself, walking through the marshland your feet sinking into the mud, in order to capture the shape of a tree overlapping another of a different colour...

The photographic technique is the most basic and natural, chemical photography, where the light reflected on the landscape corrodes the elements that make up the film emulsion, thus capturing part of the very essence of the moment. Large formats using plates or film and the use of a camera with an optical bench make it possible to approach each image as if it were a complex composition, full of decisions. A slight tilting of the optics is sufficient, making it possible to experience a wood with great clarity from the first step to the last, another movement creates a mass of diffuse colour at one end and in this way the composition is formed by focussing and taking out of focus as desired.

My life is a constant struggle with myself, among the melancholy, the madness and the obligation to belong to this society; double exposures reflect this final aim of making the two sides of myself one, brighter, more alive.

Paco Rocha

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