Interview with Jose Girl

Jose Girl was born in Zaragoza in 1977, currently residing in Los Angeles; as a photographer she is intimately related to the rock world.

Author of 3 books on this photography subject, her great vocation is portrait photography where she develops her full potential as an artist with a unique look endowing her images with a strong personal stamp. [Official Website]

What inspired you to be a photographer? How does your passion arise?

I liked it since I were very young, around 12 or 13 years old, although I didn’t think of it as a profession until many years later.

When I went to school, I started taking pictures with a spool camera we had at home. It was a pretty bad compact camera. The photo-taking ritual began to hypnotize me. I liked going out into the street alone, looking at things through the viewfinder, choosing what to take on him and what not, and returning home with that box full of surprises  I still could not see. When my mother was able to give me the money to reveal them, I would take them to the store and some of them, after being enlarged I used to give them as a birthday present

Five words describing your photography.

I don’t know how to define my work and I don´t like to do it, but I do know how to tell you what I look for in a photo and that leaves an emotional mark on me, something inside me is different after looking at it. With this I am not defining my work but what excites me of other photographers. I would like to get that when someone looks at a photo made by me.

Is there a perfect photography? What has been your biggest photo challenge?

Yes, I think there are a lot of perfect pictures. The parameters and features are different for each viewer, but the perfect photography for me is the one that deeply excites you and you would not change anything at all.

What photograph would you like to do and still have not been able to capture? What is the photo you will never do?

That of David Bowie’s, a portrait.

How do you find that moment? What does a final Jose Girl´s image have to have?

The precise moment to capture an image is “intuited”. Most of the time you have to anticipate yourself a thousandth of a second before it happens and be prepared for it. It is like “predicting the future” with the camera in hand; you have to be very fast, and many times what you expect does not happen. But the time it happens compensate for everything else, you have that “moment” you intuit was there, somewhere in time and space. It’s the exciting and frustrating part of making a portrait of someone, that uncertainty .

How is your communication and relationship with your characters?

The communication in a photo shoot is always a mystery to me. You have to try to get inside for some time in the physical and emotional space of someone, and to capture something that at the same time of being personal satisfies to you as an artist. It’s very complicated; I feel ashamed and very respectful at the same time.

What concert do you stay with of all those you have photographed? Tell us a little about your Cápsulas Mutantes

Part of my work is music photography, both the live and the environment. I really enjoy doing it and with it I live a photographic experience totally different from what is lived in a studio or in a planned session. It gives me a lot of energy. I have photographed number of concerts and I do not have one favorite, but many.
I have been working on each Enrique Bunbury tour for 13 years, photographically documenting them and sometimes I have also directed dvds and video clips on tours.
For the last Tour “Mutaciones” besides the photographic follow-up, it occurred to me that I could assemble very short video clips of things that happened during the tour and give them a unit and an entity, titling them and they were all part of a series, as if they were chapters. Thus “Cápsulas Mutantes” appeared which were shown daily in Bunbury’s social networks and after the tour we collected them in a Digital Video Book format.

What is the main advice you would give to someone who wants to get started in the photography world?

Let each one follow his instinct and pursue his artistic restlessness, whatever it may be, and insist. Do not let any “teacher” change their way of seeing and interpreting things. And that they look for valid people who can help them to spread their work, so that they can continue to dedicate themselves to creating.

Dreams and projects need to be done. What is the message you want to leave?

The projects are renewing every year, some are carried out as you expected and others do not, but the important thing is not to stop doing things, to create if that is what you like. I think the message to the artist is the creation itself.

We recently published an article about your work in our online version. What score do you think Dodho Magazine deserves?

I really like the magazine, I think it’s highly respected and the author’s standards you publish are very high.

I am very happy there is a medium like Dodho involved at that level with the creators of the photography world, to disseminate their work and to reach the right hands. That there are people who do this work, like you, makes it possible for artists to continue creating.

Photography to my understanding is still valued below what it should be in the art world, and although this has been changing for years, I feel very good when I discover media like yours.

Thank you.

It was my pleasure, Jose Girl. Thank you for giving us your time.