User:Windygees

I was born on July 24th 1953 in Valencia (Spain). The first son of the family of ten brothers. I moved to Madrid (capital of Spain) before I was two years old due to my father’s transfer from his job. My parents, Manuel and Carmen, my youngest brother, Juan, who was two months old at that time and me, started a new life in one of the suburbs of Madrid that was just starting to develop. I would have started going to school around four years old, considering the fact that around six, I was already in my second year of education in a special place, not just because of the building (formal German Embassy in Madrid), but because of its peculiarities in education. Considering that at the age of eleven when I left school, I was already studying French, English and German. We had to move again to another area of Madrid because our first building complex had no heating system, which made living there in the winter a horror. This led to me having to change school, and this new school is a religious one called “The La Salle Brothers”. At this school, I forgot all I learned about English and German, but I was able to focus more on French. There, I finished my first years of High School and move to the “Covadonga Institute”, where I started my second year of High School, and lastly in the “Cervantes Institute”, where I took a pre-university course for admission to the “University Complutense of Madrid”. I started studying Telecommunication Engineering and had to abandon the following year due to personal crisis that re-oriented me to artistic subjects (drawing, painting and photography). I changed from Technology to Education and was able to graduate by assisting evening classes at the School of Applied Arts in Madrid. I improved my level as a cartoonist with the idea of gaining admission into the Fine Arts Faculty in Madrid. I did not, but met with someone very important in my life that was able to: my wife, Maria, which was why it was inevitable for me to go to classes at the Institute and I used to go more than the really enrolled ones, I conserved this friends for over thirty years. How did I get interested in Photography? Without a doubt, through my father. He was a big fan of drawing and painting and would surely have been a great artist, but had to start working at an early aged for family reasons. He built up his interest in photography by always making use of the little images available for “something more”. For example, he was a pioneer in color and within his limited means tried to advance technically by reading whatever comes to his hands. I used his first camera and he explained to me the fundamentals of exposure, deepness of the camps and others. He also gave me my first reflex machine: A Russian Zenith. At that time I started my first photo laboratory by stealing a little space (about two square feet meters) from the kitchen. The materials used were very simple: a second hand amplified (bought within three brothers), little buckets, liquids, papers and clips. That was my little world, and since there was no ventilation, it ended up being a place of suffocation. But that magic of seeing something come out from the depth of the bucket revealed into pictures was all an experience.

II My left eye I didn’t remember who or when, but someone asked me one day: Are you left handed? And I said:-no, and he replied: but you focus with your left eye. It may seem incredible, but I was never aware of that fact even though I am right handed or something similar because I strap my watch on my right wrist. Let’s say that there two faces to capturing a photograph, the first instance is the act of having seen something that could be in the moment, in other prior situation that was pre-determined or rather spontaneous and immediate. In the second face once you take the camera and look through the visor, the process is almost one hundred percent emotional and that is not always good… In fact, we all made pictures and “pictures come out”. That little point of no control to me is what makes a pictures come alive. I try with my pictures, that people don’t see what I see, but how I see it. People think that If you take pictures with similar of identical cameras, from the same places and illumination with somebody else, those pictures will come out alike: FALSE. That is what gives value to photography. Compare to different Orchestra and different director interpreting a known song, all will be different. Now, I plead to you the reader to pick up your camera, think about what you want to do and get EMOTIONAL! …You will see how your pictures come out differently.

Manuel Igual Alonso