Editions Xavier Barral, 2020. First edition.
Clothbound hardcover, 205 x 260 cm, 96 pp., 45 color illustrations.
Photographs by Angel Albarrán, Anna Cabrera. Text by Guilhem Lesaffre (English).
The poetic universe of Spanish photographers duo Albarrán Cabrera is presented here through a dreamscape journey in the land of birds. Between reality and illusion, their photographs questions our relationship to the tangible world and vibrate gently through a wide palette and different photographic techniques: platinum and palladium prints, cyanotypes, gelatin prints, and pigmented printing…
Each photograph is like a story that seems to have been paused. The birds seem to be straight out of fantastical fairy tales; they merge into space, are revealed on reflective surfaces, and slip into the undergrowth whereas sometimes their physical presence is underlined by a tight framing. The birds are revealed through abstracting shapes sometimes simple dots and shadows. Albarrán Cabrera leave the interpretation of their images to the memory of the viewer and let our imagination fly.
This publication is part of the Des oiseaux (On birds) collection celebrating, through the vision of different artists, their immense presence in a world where they are now vulnerable. Accompanying these photographs, the ornithologist Guilhem Lesaffre writes a special essay. For this title, Lesaffre focuses on the different environments birds live in and their unbelievable capacity to adapt themselves whether it is in the sky, water or at the highest summits.
Angel Albarrán and Anna Cabrera were born in 1969 – he in Barcelona, she in Sevilla – and have been working together as a couple since 1996. Influenced by thinkers and artists from both the West and East, they draw on literature and science to create photographic work that is powerfully evocative and dream-like. Their work features in numerous private collections and institutions, including the Fundació La Pedrera, Barcelona; Fundació Toni Catany, Majorca; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. The couple is represented by a dozen galleries around the world.
