David Campany

Txema Salvans

Gaby Martinez

The Waiting Game II' is the second part of the project with which Txema Salvans won the 2012 RM Photobook Competition. This follow-up project continues to explore a series of desolate, though inhabited, landscapes of the Spanish Mediterranean. In the first book, the central figure in the photos was always a prostitute. In this second series, it is a fisherman: fishing in reservoirs and marshes, along riverbanks, or in the sea in port towns. These fishermen are endowed with endless patience and resilience, capable of blending into any kind of landscape. As a sort of mantra, the fishermen explain their activity as a way of "staying out of the house." 'The Waiting Game II' is a complement to the first book, which was only apparently about prostitution. This new project reinforces the idea that the real subject is a personal reflection on the notion of waiting.

Txema Salvans: the Waiting Game II

Guillem Martínez

To make a family photo you need several generations. In other words, a human distribution in the photo in which the viewer perceives a defined and effective distribution of the frailness or the toughness, the strength or the weakness, the fortune or the bad luck. Txema Salvans' skill - or technique (?) - consists of eliminating this labour of time and violence. His photos draw instantaneously family groups, true-to-life but possibly inexistent. His photos of diverse groups of people from all over the map of Spain - sometimes groups that aren't families; sometimes groups of people who don't even know each other - are in essence family photos. His photos are of families that never happened - as happens sometimes with family families - and that have only got together for a photo. In a photo by Txema Salvans you can always see, for example, who is going to have the most problems. Or who's dead. With this book of photos - with the text by the journalist Guillem Martinez - the reader is invited to delve into the family logic of families that have, perhaps, never happened.

Txema Salvans

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