Albarrán Cabrera are the photographers Anna Cabrera (b. 1969, Sevilla) and Angel Albarrán (b. 1969, Barcelona) who work together as a collaborative duo based in Barcelona. Both are dedicated to printing techniques and photo preservation. So for the artist duo, it is not just about the image itself, but also about devoting much time and effort into creating the prints in their darkroom. Here, traditional photographic processes, such as platinum, palladium, cyanotype or gelatin silver, fuse with inventive materials or even self-developed methods, among them mounting Japanese gampi paper with pigments on top of gold leaf. Based on this ingenuity, their photographs display far more parameters than just the image itself. The texture, colour, finishing, tones; even the border of a print gives extra information to the viewer.
The art works of Anna Cabrera and Angel Albarrán have already been on show in Spain, Japan, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Lebanon, Italy or the United States. Furthermore, well known private collections and institutions like Hermès, Goetz Collection, The German Bundestag Art Collection, Banco Santander and De Nederlandsche Bank possess fine selections of their photographs.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Time, reality, existence, identity and empathy are very interesting subjects, but the most fascinating thing is the relation between them. These relations are difficult to explain by means of words and that‘s why we rely on images. We are particularly interested in memories. We want to play with the memories of the viewer to construct a representation inside their minds. Of course we will never know what the final result will be, because any person has different memories and has grown up in different cultures and environments. Our images will only be the bare bones of this mental construction.
WHY PHOTOGRAPHY
The way a photograph is interpreted is subjective and it is related to the culture, experiences and memories of the viewer. That means that we, photographers, can explain very complex subjects or the relations between them without using a specific verbal language that follows a linguistic code made of symbols and meanings. But in turn, we use images and prints. We feel that photography can help the viewers to understand concepts difficult to understand in other way. A set of images makes the viewer to be in the same wavelength as we are.
The other reason is not a new one. Whenever we think of a photograph we think of a real event, we think we are looking at something that really took place, although we also know the images are constantly manipulated. “If it is in a photograph, it is real”. This fact gives you a lot of power to explain concepts that are difficult to explain using a different language.
There is a gap between reality and what we understand as real. And photography (as Japanese dramatist Chikamatsu once said about art ) lies in the frontier between the real and unreal, the true and the false. So it helps us to “see” what is hidden from us.
PRODUCTION
We use a wide range of processes and materials. Some of these processes are the result of the combination of several old photographic processes or they can be a mixture of new and old ones. Thus we use, platinum, palladium, cyanotype or gelatine silver processes. But we have also invented and developed new processes, as it is the case of the one we use for our colour prints: pigments, Japanese paper and gold leaf.
All this serves just one single purpose: we want to have far more parameters to play with the viewer than just the image. The texture, colour, finishing, tones; even the border of a print can give extra information to the viewer. And you can have a better control over this information just using the correct process and materials for a specific image.