Enrique Manchon

The photographic act is for me a way of exploring and manifesting the inner voice that essentially guides my responses to immediate or accumulated experience.

There is a notion related to the creative process and advanced by the poet Baudelaire that has helped me understand the nature of photographic seeing.  Baudelaire proposes that all things out there, in the external world, are signs and symbols whose relationships and analogies may be deciphered by the sensibility and imagination of artists. If one can envision the conglomerate of all things that make up our world as a type of hieroglyphic that needs to be understood, then photographic images can serve to decipher or interpret segments of that scenic and enigmatic whole.  Photographs need not explain, but they can suggest or insinuate meaning.

My images tend to reflect the external effects of modernization: global consumerism, urban evolution with its contrasting cycles of growth and decay, social marginalization and disconnection.  I tread urban space and seek the sense of chance discovery that is deemed characteristic of street photography, but images that might appear to be the result of a casual discovery are often informed by conceptual preoccupations and designs.

I am interested in the narrative dimensions created by pairs or series of thematically related images.  My latest works advance a style of visual articulation that consists in the seamless merging of inter-referential photographs.