PHOTOGRAPHER ROBERTO DE LA TORRE
RITUALS, MAGIC AND RELIGION
Communities, territories and identity of man are created by establishing limits, borders that define the internal versus the external, the known versus the unknown, us versus others, and the sacred versus the profane. In my work I explore the concept of myth-landscape as an intersection between the imaginary divinities represented by men and their natural environment and their sacred limits. Through photography I make a cultural construction that links the dominant imaginary sacred beings in each community with the sacred space that they delimit and that evolve in a sui generis way.
In MICROCOSMOS I present a hierophanic landscape. Places where the existence of the sacred becomes present, when it manifests itself through the objects of our usual cosmos as something completely opposed to the profane world.
Roberto de la Torre, is a photographer from Galicia, Spain.
Greatest inspirations or influences Roberto?
The thematic base of my work are ancestral beliefs and ancient deities. The creative technical process of the image itself is inspired by the paintings of religious icons such as Francisco de Zurbarán or Velazquez, a painter from the Spanish Golden Age.
Tell us a bit about your creative process?
Many of the masked figures I portray in MICROCOSMOS go out in ritual celebrations in isolated places very far from the big cities. There is little information on them so I often travel through these regions and involve people from these towns, as part of my research. Going to the sites to be able to photograph the masked celebrations also means going on a certain date, because many of these rituals take place once a year.
Who do you consider to be an icon of our time?
It is difficult to choose only one icon of our time. Cultural diversity and the ease we have today (thanks to social networks) of reaching the whole world have greatly dispersed our ideas of what an icon really is. I believe that true icons are found in our past cultures, in each country and each cultural field there are their own icons, based on archetypes that are inseparable from our way of thinking and understanding the world.
What does wellbeing mean to you, and what do you practice?
For me, well-being is tranquility, silence and the absence of the need to be connected. The wind on my face by the sea, a good book and the song of a bird in the morning gives me more peace of mind than anything else. We have created needs that we do not have, they have built us from consumption to be perfect robots that waste and pollute the planet. In the simple things of life is happiness, they are there, but covered with absurd needs that do not let us see them.
Anything else you would like to share?
I encourage people to get to know the cultural base that defines us, to move away a bit from the nihilism in which we live, where we forget the past and the future. MICROCOSMOS is a work that speaks of that ancestral wisdom of the past of a region of the Iberian Peninsula, but it was common throughout Europe and in other parts of the world they were defined in other ways, but they are still there.
Portrait of Roberto de la Torre by Maria de la Vega