Angel Albarrán (1969, Barcelona) and Anna Cabrera (1969, Sevilla) have worked collaboratively as art photographers since 1996. A rich inner philosophy about memory and experience – and a special curiosity for photographic chemistry – guide their aesthetic practice. Influenced by great thinkers and artists from the east, their photographs question our assumptions of time, place, and identity in order to stimulate a new understanding of our own experience and perception. For the artists, “being conscious of our surroundings isn’t just an important part of life – our surroundings and how we interpret them is life as we know it.”
The question running like a thread throughout their work is how images trigger individual memories in the viewer. Depending on their cultural background and on their personal experience, viewers will perceive images in different ways. The interest of Albarrán Cabrera lies in subjects such as time, reality, existence, identity and empathy, but what they find the most fascinating is the relation between them. These relations are difficult to explain by means of words and that is why they rely on images.
For the artist duo, it is not just about the image itself, but also about devoting much time and effort into creating the prints in their darkroom. Here, traditional photographic processes, such as platinum, palladium, cyanotype or gelatin silver, fuse with inventive materials or even self-developed methods, among them mounting Japanese gampi paper with pigments on gold leaf. The poetry and sensuality of their prints reveal an unrivalled craftsmanship and invest them with a complexity that goes far beyond a straightforward image. The texture, colour, finishing, tones; even the border of a print gives extra information to the viewer.
Albarrán Cabrera’s photographs have been exhibited in galleries and photo fairs in Spain, Japan, USA, Switzerland, Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Germany, Lebanon, and Italy. Private collections and institutions that house their photographs include Hermès, Goetz Collection, The German Bundestag’s Art Collection, Banco de Santander and De Nederlandsche Bank. They have also produced photographic prints for institutions such as Fundació La Pedrera, Barcelona; Fundació Toni Catany, Mallorca; Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid; FotoColectania, Barcelona; the Photographic Archive, Barcelona. They have collaborated with publishers such as Adelphi Edizioni, Mondadori Libri, Penguin Random House, Diogenes Verlag, RM editions, and Ediciones Atalanta as well as companies/institutions such as La Monnaie De Munt, Belgium’s federal opera house.