Paula Yubero

Photography

Feb 23

Written By WÜL Magazine

Photographer Madrid ⎯ Porto

Paula Yubero is a photographer based between Madrid and Porto. She discovered her passion for photography during her Fine Arts degree, where she spent most of her time in the darkroom, amazed by its magic. She was selected for Descubrimientos Photoespaña 2019. After finishing her degree, she decided to specialize in contemporary photography by studying for a Master's degree, when she developed her project El Jardín. It ended up being a dummy, finalist with an honorable mention in the Photobook Award of the Encontros da Imagem (Braga-Portugal). Currently, she continues to develop personal projects in parallel with commissions.

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When I was little, I had an invisible friend who lived in my parent’s closet. I spent my time locked in that place, covered by the feeling of clothes and the smell of home. Inside that tiny space, everything I wanted could happen, a small microcosm in which the line between the physical and the imaginary became thin, in a daydream mood that became my safe place. I don’t remember the day when I stopped seeing my friend and inhabiting that place. I like to think of that moment as the first time I was creating images.

Photography, for me, is a constant dialogue between the physical and the imaginary, a way of being in the world through daydreams. It is the photographic act itself that takes me to another mental place, through what I can see, of traces of reality. I photograph with my whole body, always working with heavy and slow cameras that make that small moment a ritual in itself. Thus creating my own cosmos, where the small becomes big, where through the tiny I try to understand and inhabit the space that surrounds me in a constant search for that safe place. I collect images like someone keeping a diary. I do it as someone who builds an intimate garden, working with time, the physical, and the imaginary. I open to the viewer my most intimate space through which they can tell themselves their own stories. I would describe my style as close, tender, and honest.

I find essential in my work the interpretation of the viewer and the intimate dialogue that can be created between the viewer and the artist through the work. To maintain this intimacy, I am interested in formalizing my body of work in the format of photobooks.

I continue to develop my personal projects, giving them the space and time that I consider they need. I am starting a project about my relationship with my father, working from my gut and intuition, and still in the process of trying to understand what I want to tell. As I consider my practice to be constantly changing, I am looking for a certain tension in my work.