Ricardo Cases_Publicaciones
Sol
ISBN 978-84-697-8268-2. Dalpine, 2017: Photos: Ricardo Cases. Text: Luis López Navarro. Traduction: Aitor Arauz Chapman: Desing: Ángel Álvarez (Tipode Office). Soft cover. 21 x 29,7 cm. Spanish/English. Prize: 20 euros
Continuing with the line started in El porqué de las naranjas (MACK, 2014), Ricardo Cases delves again into a cliché on the Levantine coast. Posing his task as a children’s game consisting of representing the sun, the author immerses himself in the blinding light of the Levantine summer in search of its essence, allowing himself to be carried away by the sensations and questioning the way in which the sun determines identity, the aesthetics and the local economy.
Panorama
Ángel Álvarez, 2020. Photos: Ricardo Cases. Text (spanish and english): Esther García Llovet. Desing: Tipode Office. Edit and images sequence: Ricardo Cases. Soft cover 14 x 28 cm. 28 pages: Prize: 15 euros
When we get lost in a forest, the moss on the trees tells us where the north is. When we get lost in Benidorm, the thousands of terraces on the facades tell us where the south is, a Mediterranean as dazzling and smooth as aluminum foil.
The reason for the oranges
ISBN 9781910164044. MACK, 2014. Hardcover with silkscreened artwork. 128 pages. 67 pictures in color. 14.7 cm x 18.7 cm.
For a photographer, comes a point in that document, not enough visible reality. Document the surface is to document symptoms, consequences, it is late. When you want to really dig into the life that surrounds us, it is necessary to search for the essential mode of documenting the not visible. The mechanisms.
If ignored the surface and it is well alert to signals, a scale model of all, a laboratory can be found in the immediate surroundings of the photographer (in this case, the orchards of the East, a quake epicenter of contemporary Spain) where these mechanisms they manifest themselves in freedom. No need to go far to find evidence of major phenomena. “The reason of the oranges” is not, therefore, literally, a portrait of the Levant. It is a portrait of the spirit of the Levant and by extension of the spirit of the Spain of today.
Pigeons to the air
ISBN 978-84-617-0017-2. Photovision-Schaden-Dewi Lewis, 2011. Cover cardboard, binding spiral. Design: Ricardo Cases. 75 pages. 21 x 15 cm
The pigeon-breeder invests in their pigeons time, money and hope. He feeds them, gives them a name, trains them and he has faith in them. When the day of the competition comes, he arrives with theuncertainty and hope of a child. The pigeon-breeding is a sport with rules and referees. Pigeons arrive to be worth thousands of euros and bets moving lots of money. However, there is some childhood fascination for birds; the man who holds a shaky bird in the hand has the same look that had 10-year-old.
Raising a champion pigeon suppose prestige and profits. Painted with combinations of primary colors, like a flag or a football team, the selected pigeon, bred and trained to mate becomes projection, flying vector of the pigeon-breeder, who will play in the community, its success or failure sporting, economic and sexual. Away from their daily miseries, the pigeon-breeder has a parallel life where he can get to the top in the pigeon fancier universe. You just need to have a winning bird. The pigeon-breeder stays on Earth but its vector can fly.
The case of the frozen wolf
ISBN: 978-84-613-1841-4. Photographic books of the Kursala 13. First edition: Festival editions 2009. Design: Natalia Troitiño. Rustic with a plastic jacket. 80 pages. 210 x 140 mm. Language: Spanish, English
Account owner of a reserve in the North of Spain, who not long ago hunted a wolf. In good times, the animal has been dissected or perhaps pulled directly into the trash. Today, poor and illegal part ended his days in a chest freezer. “If important people come to hunt, we take it out the freezer the day before and say: “look at what we killed yesterday”. It is what they want to see”.
The fight with nature makes a man, a man. For the urbanite who can spend years without ever seeing animals that eat, but just thighs and fillets, kill an animal to eat is a contact with reality almost traumatic but exciting. It is life. Be able to say: I killed it.
Of course, for that, there are also theme parks. A hunting ground is not a wild mountain where there are still deer: it is a private and fenced area where deer are raised and given to eat throughout the year. When hunting season, the urbanite will come from the city in his 4×4 with leather seats in search of this experience. It is carried by the blood and the harsh environment surrounding the monteria gives what he lost: the being of people. With the gun in his hand, the Spanish people who conquered the city reminds that it is still a man, who can survive.
Then he takes a photo with his frozen wolf and goes back up to his 4×4 without ever feeling that he has got what he came f
The city that I am
Maqueta, 2008. Hardcover. Design: Nerea García Pascual. Binding: Isabel Zambelli. 64 pages. 205 x 260 mm. Language: Spanish
Madrid will lack a flysheet, i.e. double city. The city that can widen, to widen it. But if I were an architect, it would plan one city on top of another. It would be the most brilliant project in the world. A city on top of another one at night and the other day, a lit, bottom and the other open, top. I would live in the above, clear. But I would move to the bottom.
Suburb Beauty
ISBN: 978-84-613-1841-4. First Edition: University of Extremadura, 2008. Design: Nerea García Pascual. Hardcover. 104 pages. 225 x 335 mm. Languages: Spanish, English
When they arrived at Madrid, the Center was already busy. They were installed in the South: Fuenlabrada, Leganés, Getafe, and Parla. They came from Andalusia and Extremadura. They changed the people around the neighborhood. They went to work and became the working class. That was almost fifty years ago.
Today there are grandchildren who inhabit these southern cities that are all people and the entire neighborhood. Of those early settlers have inherited some things: they remain working class and preserve the pride of that fight, a certain character of people and Leopard prints.
What differentiates, two generations later, the appearance of a girl from the of a central Madrid Parla? The beauty codes of the capital city are defined from the top of the pyramid media: just look at the advertising and fashion magazines to identify why people dress as she dresses each season. The aesthetics of the neighborhood, on the other hand, consists not printed in any magazine and baby your user environment. It’s a big difference: in times of mass culture, the beauty of district is a culture that is passed from mothers to daughters. Models who do not advertise, are market products that do not appear in the magazines. And the reverse of the mechanism of fashion, not creating a culture to be sold but that they are manufactured for nurturing a culture.