We are

Paco Gómez

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.

Project K.

A Kafkaesque investigation

Project

Project K. is a crazy historic research, drifting between reality and fiction fronts, on the events happened in czech writer Franz Kafka’s life. This series starts by describing the process which led Kafka to go under a dreams capture process devised by doctor Robert Klopstock, in the winter of 1924. A dying Kafka, seriously ill with tuberculosis and deprived of his power of speech, undertook that way an attempt to put into images his oniric universe owing the limitations he faced when trying to transfer that very same universe to literature. The 103 plates resulting from the experiment have been managed by Praga Kafka Society until today and it was in 2003 when a visible stand for part of those dreams was eventually developed by means of the computer method of Interpolated Translation by Simbology (I.T.S).

Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer. Budapest 1917
Franz Kafka. Prague, 1922
Robert Klopstock „A Hungarian Physician“, Prague 1924
An original slide by photo studio of J. O. Dvořák, Vinohrady, Prague
Franz Kafka (?) walks by the Royal Palace, Madrid, September 1911
The house of Kafka’s sister Elli, Polská ulice No. 42 in Prague where Kafka wrote his novel The Trial in 1914
Franz Kafka and Robert Klopstock at the dream capture desk. Sanatorium of Dr. Hoffmann. Kierling. Vienna 1926
Plate Nº 0014. Joseph K. stands up for his inocence at the inaccesible high court departments at a stage of the trial when no help is allowed and the defendant is beyond the attorney mea
Plate Nº 0021. Second degree oficials arrest Josef K. to be presented before the high court which will settle the trial
Plate Nº 0037.Two patrons of the hunger’s artist ponder over the fact (also taking into account their own experience) whether he has been really unconditionally fasting
Plate Nº 0079(*). K. has reached the final frontier at where he might spend many years before a new story starts over again to remain unfinished. Destiny of that sort chasese him.
(*) Visionaries appreciate there is a likeness between this image and a drawing founded in Kafka diary where a man crumbles in desperation over the table
Plate Nº 0080(*). Help awaits for him somewhere, guides are taking him there.
(*) Just like Plate Nº. 0079, visionaries want to stress the starling likeness between this plate and a drawing founded in Kafka diary where a man seems to levitate
Plate Nº 0052. Gregor Samsa does not fancy milk which used to be his most favourite drink (his sister thought it to be that way and so placed it there). He turned away from the bowl revolted by the smell and crept onto the center of the room.
Plate Nº 0017. Gregor Samsa lays on his back uncapable of standing up
Plate Nº 0048. Surveyor K. finally stepped on the hill. After traspassing the horizon of events K. gain access to the first ditch and eternally awaits before the castle for audience.
Plate Nº 0102. K in the previous instant to traspassing the horizon of events. Despite nothing makes much noise, everything resound when falling down