About me
My name is Juan Camilo Valero Peña. I was born in South Colombia in 1995 on February 26. At 8 years old, I moved to Madrid with my mother. There I studied photography at the Escuela de Arte 10 and EFTI(International Center of Photography and Cinema) from 2014 to 2017. I currently reside in Berlin where I am developing my artistic career as a photographer and audiovisual artist. Mainly I work on projects related to photobook, digital collage, documentary photography and artistic photography; Since I was little, I always felt a great fascination for art, even more so when I discovered photography as my means of expression.
My life was always linked to photography. As a child, I didn’t spend to much time with my mother, so I had to stay with different families, in Bogotá, -my family was in town- who took care of me under a basic rule of my mother: “in someone else’s house, nothing is touched ”. There I began to develop my eye, around 4-5 years old -where I have my first memories- since the best way to interact with the world at that time and respecting my mother’s rule, was to observe. I could spend hours looking around, looking around and enjoying myself at the same time.
It is at the age of 20 that I come across photography directly. I managed to have my first camera; There, my life transcends, evolves. I find the means by which I can express myself. And as I have grown in recent years through the camera, I have felt the great need to know myself through it. Everything that I live passes through my camera, my successes and my failures. It is my memory, it is the experience of a person who sees through himself, the world and its infinite faces of beauty. I could say that it inspires me to live, know and learn. You learn a lot from people, it is what is most similar to each one of us. We are human beings, people connected in some way. So, with everything. This is something that I have verified through photography, that the course of life, wherever we are, is the same for everything and everyone. That is why within photography, I opted for portraiture and documentary / artistic photography.
At the end of 2018, I started in digital collage, after losing my photographic equipment. I fell asleep on a train in Barcelona. At that time, I was financially unable to obtain a new equipment. At that moment, I came to the following conclusion: “I am a photographer, with or without a camera”.
That was when I began to create what I call «mental photographs», based on the (digital) collage technique; the intention began being, to take «photographs of the mind.» Later, I found the possibility of constructing an aspect of the mind by adding meanings to the elements that I introduce in each image. Through this “poetryization” and the influence of psychoanalysis, I took as an example the structure of Freud’s mind, until I had developed my own conception ordering our interior by worlds of consciousness, the mind being an environment , almost a tool for accessing the soul or pure consciousness.
Each of the works has a meaning that starts from a language that I am constructing. For now I have established figurative models, such as nudes, which mean: «pure thought»; Vehicles: «the transport of thoughts» or «neurotransmitters»; Dressed people refer to: «personified thoughts» or «ego / s»; the next step of the language will be to apply the psychology of color; Here, as with the purest photography of my work, the purpose is to get to know me and facilitate through my works, the possibility for people to know themselves.
In general, I am inspired by what I am experiencing. Nature, people. The Sunlight inspires me a lot, it is everywhere although not in all places it manifests in the same way. It is something beautiful; The music, specifically some samba classics like Carlos Erasmo or Cartola, salsa classics like Héctor Lavoe or soul classics like Al-Green, although in general, all music inspires me. I understand it as a frequency that has synergy with the rhythm of the nature of the universe.
As for authors, Annie Leibovitz or Alec Soth, they are photographers who fascinate me in terms of how they relate to the world through the camera. They are photographers with whom I identify. It is true that at the collage level, the pop photography of Stephen Shore and William Egglestone, due to their mastery of color and naturalness of how bittersweet life is, in terms of what they convey in my opinion, is something wonderful; Finally, to not extend myself much further, Forrest Gump and Inception are the perfect mix in terms of cinema, of the inspiration that comes from how I understand what it is to live and how we come to think.
I believe and consider that art is a fundamental piece in the evolution of the human being. It is of great help as a way of transcendence of our own cycles, our consciousness and therefore, our soul.