JAVIER LÓPEZ DE LERMA

     Phd in New Cultural & Artistic Práctices, photographer and film-maker Javier López de Lerma, has been experimenting with the potential of the Image since the origins of his academic education at the Manchester Metropolitan University U.K., in 1997. During this period, he conceives Photography as an art in connection with Cinema, Performance Arts and Crafts.

     Soon, he will meet international artists and start exhibiting his work around the world in so different geographical areas like, Taipei, Hong Kong, Beijing, Romania, Austria, London, Athens and Barcelona. In this period, he outlines a memorable participation with Michael Nyman and Peter Greenaway at the itinerant group exhibition Random Ize in 2001, and very especially, that in Barcelona at the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival, 2003, showing his short film Thank Big Toe as a pre-screening pass of David Lynchs Lost Highway master piece.

     His artistic activity finds out serious problems when he returns to Spain. He has to take a long gap from continuing developing his work, and starts working for several T.V. channels and video production companies as camera man, editor and réalisateur. After a while, he takes advantage of the economic crisis in Spain, and decides to break up with any professional activity related to the fields of T.V. and commercials, and resolves to continue with his artistic practice by taking his PhD at the Faculty of Arts of Cuenca, Spain.

     It is then when he strongly restarts his artistic practice by focusing his vision to the social area by travelling to Bolivia, Kenya, Dominican Republic and Haiti, where he produces his documentary film trilogy called “The drifting”. The process of editing of these documentaries are also an inspiration to construct, at the same time, his photographic series “The non-visible space between the real and e imaginary”, establishing a parallel work in progress with the filmographic work.

     Due to the endless transits of the trajectory of his life, his persona has developed a look towards the horizon, and as a result, it has draw a path in his work inspired by the idea of drifting as a way of life, and that configurations of these kind of experiences: nostalgia, sense of displacement, need of belonging, cultural identity... The reencounter. The loss.

​     Nowadays, he develops his work as well as he teaches photography at the Albacete´s School of Arts and Design in Castilla La-Mancha, Spain.

     “I tend to film when I believe photography is not the appropriate media, and I normally photograph when I think the same about filming. Even so, I comprehend both disciplines as one.”