Founded in 2005, NOPHOTO is a contemporary photography collective that aims to make UNCONVENTIONAL individual and collective projects viable.
The collective is characterized by its open content, an interdisciplinary thread in its forms, the use of multiple supports such as the web and digital projections when distributing projects, and the personal involvement of its members during the creative and production process.
NOPHOTO takes negation as its starting point. NOPHOTO is not an agency of photographers, but an ATTITUDE. A way of seeing. A revolution. A ‘NO’ (where there’s never enough).
This aesthetic attitude makes NOPHOTO not renounce any kind of creation or exhibition. Works by the collective offer an experienced view of the everyday, which always leads to the extraordinary. This process is the result of group reflection and interaction among alternative creative processes.
“It’s not that we like to take the opposing view; it’s that we enjoy walking slowly, clumsily, observing minute differences between things, discovering their rhythms. Trying to describe an object, turn it on its head, comb its surroundings and cover the entire perimeter. Asking ourselves what it’s made of and what role it plays in the story. Demanding of ourselves that we wear the subject out and still haven’t said anything. Demanding of ourselves that we look closely and yet haven’t resolved anything. Not to illustrate, define or take photographs. We like to unphotograph things and unname them.”
NOPHOTO was awarded the Revelación Award 2006 by the PHotoEspaña International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts.
It took Paco Gómez ten years to write THE MODLINS. Ten years of research, full of difficulties, to compose a narrative puzzle where the author rebuilds, from photos found in the trash, the disturbing and strange story of the Modlins, a family of American artists obsessed with fame who settled in Madrid in the 70's in Spain. The Modlins' family was linked to many historical events in the 20th century, in the USA as well as in Spain, and during their lifetime they spread clues so their adventure was told how they had decided. Paco Gómez then becomes with this book the performer of the wish of people who are dead and he never met. THE MODLINS is an atypical book, half way between literature and photography, printed in four colors and in an exquisite edition. It puts together a story you read while seeing or you see while reading, where the reader little by little becomes an spectator generating a movie in her or his imagination. Text and image shape a single literary body where different literary genders come together, in a natural way, such as journalistic chronicle, detective biography, personal journal, fiction and, of course, photography.
First edition: 2500 copies. Second edition: 1500 copies / 14 x 21.5 cm / 288 pages / Perfect binding with flaps / Text Editor: Sebastián Taberna / Design: M/Gráfico / Cover Illustration: Ana Cubas / Proofreading: Ángela Villaverde and Juan Marqués