Luis Zarzuela

MICROFICTIONS. Although I have always liked photography, I have been “playing consciously” with the camera for about four years. In this time, in which I have traveled a lot, street photography has become a serious pass time for me and I rarely venture out without my camera. Organizing reality within the magical discipline of the frame, playing with light and shadows, combining human and objectual elements in symbolic associations, meeting strangers in your own neighborhood or in a remote country, wandering the streets in search for the ordinary miracles of life to happen… is powerful, addictive motivations. It is probably because I have a literary education that literature and narrative have become a natural ecosystem for me, which means I tend to approach street photography in a narrative way. For me, street photography is essentially the art of storytelling. Not only does it consist of capturing stories, but also in creating them.
Somehow, a memorable picture works like a haiku or micro-fiction. It communicates through ellipsis, it insinuates more than it tells and it plants the seed of an imaginary tree that grows and gravitates around it. The ability to grasp (or create) stories out of a frozen instant in time is what I admire most in the work of my favorite photographers. The following series of pictures were taken in several cities around the world: Madrid, Varanasi Bangkok, Moskow, Beijing, Kiev. They are very different with regards to technique, light, and style, but they all have the desire to operate as a short narrative in common. They are (or intend to be), in their own way, visual microfictions.

COUNTRY | Spain

BIO | I was born in Zamora, a small town in the region of Castilla, Spain, in 1976. I work as a secondary school teacher in Madrid, which has been my base since 2002.