Portraiture Shortlist

I usually photograph people in the street; passersby I come across with when I’m walking in different cities around the world. Photography allows me to see an underlying dimension that I could hardly perceive with the naked eye. It’s a hybrid process that begins with digital capture and ends with the completion of the blueprint, whose monochromatic tones and loss of detail contribute to emphasising the most essential elements in images. This way, without imposture or context, the faces of passersby are revealed to me in an unequivocally transcendent manner.

Joan-Ramon Manchado is a sculptor and a self-taught photographer, based in Barcelona. In 2018 he began photographing people in public spaces of different cities around the world, sometimes including the urban context and other times avoiding it to give maximum prominence to people. Although digital photography is an important part of his work process, he is especially interested in the materiality of the photographic object and in traditional techniques that allow him to experiment.