From the bold and provocative submissions in this year’s Life Framer competition, we kept returning to Francisco Gonzalez Camacho’s series of personal reflections. Sometimes it’s the small and quiet thing that unexpectedly stands out. Subtle and introspective, the project is a refreshingly intimate offering from the artist’s inner life.

Gonzalez Camacho noticed a crack in the pavement and stopped to align his own shadow, so that the line fractured
his silhouette. The resulting image speaks to the feeling of being internally divided, in a way that most conventional photographs can’t do, through only a few textured shapes and a figure.

Gonzalez Camacho uses the techniques of infrared, inversion, and photopolymer etching to make his imagery. These processes confound expectations of what should be light and what should be dark. At times, the light becomes impenetrable, and the contents of the shadows become easier to understand. It’s a way to look clearly into the darkness. Shadows in the landscape, like those in our own soul or psyche, can be a fearsome place to go. In Gonzalez Camacho’s images, nature provides a sympathetic reflection, a gentle pathway into the dark.

You can’t enter the same river twice explores the concept of impermanence, the futility of becoming, and the landscape
as an agent of transformation. An unknowable rhythm unfolds, forms bend, break, emerge, dissolve, neither whole nor undone.

Elsewhere is an introspective dive into my own immigration journey to Finland, and the feelings of isolation involved, using the landscape as a tool for emotional catharsis. The series explores my internal processes of physical and spiritual displacement as an immigrant.

Francisco Gonzalez Camacho (b. 1990) is a Spanish visual artist currently based in Finland. Gonzalez Camacho’s work presents a process-based approach interweaving photography and graphic printing methods, with Nordic nature as the central subject.
His practice explores themes such as materiality, immigration
and the affinity between landscape and self.

International exhibitions include Saatchi Gallery (UK), the Finnish Museum of Photography (FI), the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts (JP). His work is featured in publications such as Der Greif, Booooooom and FishEye magazine. He is work is part of permanent collections in museums around the world.

LIFEFRAMER - Series AwardGonzalez Camacho is the winner of this year’s prestigious Life Framer’s Series Award, juried by Mia Dalglish and Lisa Woodward. This competition receives submissions from all around the world, and one exceptional series is selected each year for a solo exhibition, with funding from Life Framer.