NudeFemale nudes photography; Yuri Benitez

I discovered photography when I was thirteen or fourteen years old, when I choose an artistic grade in high school.

I fell in love! I even outrun the rest of my classmates because I felt the need to explore beyond of what the teacher was promising will do next week. I bought a developer and a fixer at the local photoshop in my neighborhood, and cover the windows of the bathroom of my mothers house, to improvise a darkroom. And voila! Just with the theory learned in class, I could develop my first roll of film and print my very first contact sheet by myself.

Thirty‐five years later, that is how much of my life as a photographer has been,I have learned my profession by trial and error, studying and analyzing the images from magazines, art books, even billboards on the street, and figuring my own approach. Driven by the fascination of photography I wanted to tried on everything, outdoors, indoors, people, tabletop, architecture, autos, etc. but at the end I finally decided to specialize in fashion on one hand, and food on the other. It has been my way of life for quite a while now, and I am very thankful to those industries for giving me a good job.

But besides my commercial work, there has been always the need to express the images that live in my head, images that are created by inspiration from everywhere. I have always thought since the adoption of the digital process, that there should be like an inkjet printer connected to the brain, a “printer for ideas”, in which with the press of a button came out the image one is envisioning, and then I realized, isn’t that the description of a photographer, “the printer of ideas”, the button is the one of the camera, the inks is the light that reflects on all the elements that are gathered in the scene, and the paper is the time, “the perfect time” you have to make or wait to shoot.

One subject that I find incredibly attracted to is women. I have though of them as a completely enigmatic being, and the more enigmatic, the more attractive to know them, to understand them, to feel them, to unrobed them, as if a truth or mystery is finally revealed. About two years ago, I began a self assigned project which is this series of female nudes working in two styles simultaneously; one is presenting the figure surrounded in a not so unrealistic environment (the corner of aroom, against a room wall) created specifically for the scene. The other is style is portraying the figure in a set created or complemented by geometric figures, which contrast absolutely whit the shape of the human body.

One aspect remains common in both styles, the anonymity. I just want to photograph the woman, not the person, and at the same time there is still a little bit of enigma left on the images. Black and white is also my requirement for this kind of photographs, although one can imagine the tone of the skin and the color of the hair by the gray scale, there is always that mysticism that the monochromatic image leaves on the spectator, trying to fill the color in a familiar situation. I am fortunate to have the help of some of the models I work with in fashion assignments to pose for my project, and I am very thankful to them also. I keep generating new ideas, specially on those occasions when creativity flows easily, and I write them down, I know I have to do that because some day are very vivid and expressive that is almost “sealed” in my head, and suddenly the next day or week I realized it is blurred and not so well defined.

Producing them takes a lot of time and preparation, from the setup of the scene to the comfort of the model, and finally to the shooting session. After that, I process my own files and keep to a minimum the retouching. I enjoy to “develop” the raw file like the old times in the darkroom (now in a “Lightroom”), burning and dodging, and then when it is exported, I just add touch ups for some imperfections. I am very pleased doing my job, and specially my pastime, that is “printing” my ideas, which I will be sharing with you. [Official website]