BIO - javierarcenillas

STATEMENT

Photographer and Editor, he has a degree in Developmental Psychology from the Complutense University. He studied Cinema at the Madrid Film School, graduating in Cinematography and Directing. And photography with Fernando Herráez and Manuel Sonseca in the old photography schools of Alcobendas.

He has been working professionally in photography since 1994, collaborating at the beginning for the newspaper Marca and local newspapers and gazettes. He was part of the staff in the second period of Diario 16 and was a member of the now defunct agency COVER. He has collaborated periodically with El País, El Mundo, La Voz de Galicia and Diario de León, as well as with magazines such as Telva, Cosmopolitan, Ser Padres or Paisajes desde el Tren among others in Spain and Time, Sunday Times, El Periódico de Guatemala, Gatopardo, CNN or L’expresso among the international ones.

Since 1994 he has worked as a photographer for Alcobendas Town Council.

PUBLICATIONS (Selection)

Time, Spiegel, Stern, Lens, El Periodico de Guatemala, New York Times, Sunday Times, Soy502, El Pais, GEO, National Geographic, El Mundo, Libero, Planeta Futuro, El Confidencial, Internationale, ViceNews, Miami Herald, Le Monde, Zazpika, Man on the Moon, Esquire, FronteraD, Tinta Libre, Gatopardo, La Tercera, XL Semanal, Altair, 5W, Viento Sur, TRIP Magazine, El Global, GQ, L´Expresso, El Viajero, IL Magazine.

PORTFOLIOS (Selection)

American Photography 201, Revista Fotografías, Fotofrance 110, Amateur Photography, Diorama 155, Súperfoto, Revista Foto, FV 140. Aquí Imagen 39, Hasselblad Forum, ArteFotográfico 574 y 670 Revista FOTO 250 y 283, El Desafio de Alcobendas, Ed, Ayto Alcobendas. Amnistia Internacinal, Photography Mercadillo, Lens Culture, Metal, Bjp, Albedo Media. CAPTION Magazine.

AWARDS

The Eugene Smith Fellowship, POYI and POYI Latam Awards, the Getty Images Grant, Arts Press Award, KODAK Young Photographer, European Social Fund Grant, Photographer of the year in Moscow Photo Award, UNICEF Award, Fujifilm EuroPress, Lorenzo Natali Journalism Award, Sony Awards, Gomma Grant, Atlanta Photojournalism, Lucas Dolega and World Press Photo.

National awards include the Fotopress, Luis Ksado, INJUVE, ASISA, Luis Valtueña de Médicos del Mundo, Fotonoviembre, Premio Ávila de Periodismo, Premio Mingote de ABC or the first professional scholarship of the Seminario de Albarracín.

TEACHING AND METHODOLOGY

He started as a teacher at the Photoescuela COVER Agency, which he directed from 2004 until 2008, when the agency closed. There he worked on the fundamentals of teaching photography through the author’s reportage, implementing the personal vision and the relative concept in documentary projects, creating an editing workshop that allowed the narratives to be separated into Temporary, Synchronic and Sensitive. He is currently a lecturer in Contemporary Landscape, Architecture and Documentary

He teaches a personal training method based on the New Documentary based on a photographic narrative based on direct visual language and Sensitive or Mirror Editing. His photography belongs to the current of Emotional Documentary where he explores the Psycho-Sociology of the environment in the chaos of behaviour. His projects study violence, ideology, oblivion or longing in two ways

-Social Documentary Essays ( Sicarios, Latidoamerica, Weapon Social Club, Sleepers, CityHope, Citizens of despair etc) which allow to connect and study different human realities such as violence, human rights and marginalisation or exclusion.

-Narrative Documentary Essays ( Ufopresencias, Transylvania, Akelarre, Christoland, SevaN, EdeN etc) that explore the beliefs, tales and legends that we imagine and develop in an unreal or develop in an unreal or fictitious way in order to understand ourselves. They are the poles of human understanding, the one that positions us in a present reality or the one we imagine. Truth or Lies, Black and White or Colour, Up or Down, Too Much or Too Little, Yin or Yang.

There will always be two points of view that will delimit the confrontation of the balance of order and chaos.

FEATURED PROJECTS

CITY HOPE, 2007

Completes this trial and publishes it with doctors around the world. the world. I need to move away from the classicism of photojournalism and work under the umbrella of another kind of photography. I use the portrait and a technical camera to be able to show the idea of the characters above the fact, inspired by the work of Claudio Edinger.

TRANSILVANIA 2009

Here he realised how fun it was to tell something that did not exist through to tell something that didn’t exist through places and people. The search for vampires in Romania. What it was, travel photography, documentary, photojournalism?????

CITIZENS OF DESPAIR 2009

This documentary essay was made together with Cristina de Middel with whom I travelled from India to Myanmar doing different works. Under the auspices of MSF they portrayed one of the largest refugee camps in the world belonging to the Rohingyas. From two points of view, one touristic and the other social, they published the book Welcome. The photographs were intended to follow the aesthetics of City Hope, using an aggressive blur and focusing on the refugees and moving away from the codes of classicism.

LATIDOAMERICA AND EMOTIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING

Emotional documentary filmmaking, an essay that encompasses the tetralogy on violence in Latin America Sicarios, RedNote, Gangborder and Narcoturismo. (The inspiration for these works always came from Don McCullin and his book Sleeping with Ghosts)

The concept of Latidoamerica was for the images to capture the pain and the moment when everything fragments and breaks around the people photographed; to portray the concept of fragility and helplessness. In 2015 he said “Many photographers after photographing death forget about it, they move on from one job to the next without flinching, but I find it hard. When I finished after 10 years I had to work on other things”.

SICARIOS 2010/2011

He went to work in Guatemala thanks to two good friends, Jesus Alfonso and Moisés Castillo, and found himself with a project he couldn’t leave. Sicarios were wreaking havoc, criminals who killed for money. He met several assassins, journalists and anonymous people who told him facts and information about the different ways they acted, he started documenting their terrible actions to later meet several of them. Thanks to a fixer I was able to follow some of them for months, few photos, a lot of waiting… most of the work was resources, dead, police, places, very little material of them alone but what little there was was very good. Years later the colleagues at El Periódico would send him the news of the deaths of every sicario he met.

REDNOTE 2012/2016

He moved to Honduras to live in the house of the journalist Alberto Arce, which in those years was the most violent country in the world, working mainly in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. He worked on the idea of a country that lived with the psychosis of violence in the streets permanently. Until today his best work without a doubt and thanks to the help of journalists working in the area like Orlyn Castro who offered me their contacts and logistics.

GANGBORDER 2014/2018

I gradually moved to El Salvador to document the same violence that existed in Guatemala and Honduras, but there the main germ was the gangs. There I met many people with different ways of approaching the idea of gangs, working with his colleague Alberto Garcia Palomo and the journalist Salvador Sagastizado. With that he ended his work surprised that many do not see gang members who have killed and used violence or drug trafficking and intimidation as a problem.

CHRISTOLAND 2017

Now getting into more curious topics, he publishes with RM publishing houseUfopresences, continuing with the idea of narrative essays that play with theplay with the imaginary. He had previously produced a short essay on the AKELARRES (2016) in Spain, which convinced him to go to the Holy Land to discover the footsteps of Christ. The work contemplates the places of Christian culture that many of us have heard of, studied or believed in. Unique territories that give off a different energy.

SEVAN 2018

It continues along the path opened in Christoland and is a story that breathes of the tales that breathes from the tales of Armenian Christianity, shaped as diptychs that explore a territory diptychs exploring a magical territory.

EDEN 2017/2022

A project in progress. I wanted to make a story narrated as a black and white adventure film. Diptychs, triptychs and polyptychs that play an illusion, through the exploration of the rites of the Amazon as if it were a sensory journey.

MUTANTES 2015 /20……

The welfare society at the social frontier of the urban periphery within dormitory towns. The ongoing mutant project portrays the sociological pattern of individual behaviour of people in times of social networks from the new generation of young people who inherit them to retired people who have no dependence on them in a complacent urban environment suited to their needs. Under aesthetics and fashions, today’s society is immersed in a profound chaos, within the periphery of many cities, people live in a parallel universe as if it were an invisible frontier. People have been transformed into a contemplative and superfluous life of cheap commerce and accelerated consumerism, their way of life has been transformed into an unreal appearance.

LA GUAREÑA 2022

The story of a unique region where time is beginning to erode its identity. In a harsh region where it hardly rains and where the population is getting older and older, the culture of the bull and the land is heading for oblivion with no way back. With a self-economy based on agriculture and with no prospects of change, Guareña offers a portrait of a hollowed-out Spain that is being lost.

• WORKS IN PUBLIC COLLECTIONS (Selection)

“Géneros y Tendencias”. Alcobendas. Universidad de Salamanca. U.A.M. The Charco Gallery, Ayto. San Sebastián de los Reyes, Ayto. de Valdemoro, Ministerio de Agricultura, Museo del Ejército, Fundación Ferrandiz, Tránsito en Toledo, Deutsche Bank Fundation, London Photography Asoc, Diputación de Bizcaia, AFGU, CajaBurgos, Visa Pour l´image, Ayto de Barcelona, Ayto de Madrid, Ayto de Zafra, Fundació La Caixa, Fundation Getty, Ayto de Cambrils, Asociació Sarthou Carreres, Instituto de la Juventud, Real Sociedad Fotográfica, Diputación de Zamora, Cajamadrid, Caja de Burgos, Caja España, UNION LATINA, CAM, Diputacion de Albacete, Ayuntamiento de París, Colecciones privadas e independientes.

PHOTOBOOKS

• EDITOR (Publications)