Javier Inés
BIO
Javier Inés (Zaragoza 1956 – Barcelona 1991)
Photographer. When he was a teenager, some friends gave him his first camera, a simple Werlisa Color, with which he took up photography to portray the world around him. For four years, he attended photography workshop courses at the Spectrum Canon Gallery in Zaragoza, where, in 1981, he held his first exhibition at the age of twenty-five.
In 1985 he moved to Barcelona, where he was attracted by Barcelona’s nightlife and show business. He combined his profession as a photographer with that of a night waiter in fashionable bars, such as KGB or Distrito Distinto, an income that helped him to expand his photographic equipment. He set up a portrait studio in his home and began to take assignments for advertising agencies. He published in the main magazines of the time, such as Vivir en Barcelona, La Vanguardia Mujer, Primera Línea, and Ajoblanco, among others.
In addition to her professionally commissioned work portraying achievers from the world of finance, television, art, fashion, and show business, Inés regularly photographed the underground world and Barcelona’s nightlife, exploring the forbidden areas of the city. His models were those uncomfortable characters, the invisible ones for a city of achievers on the verge of the Olympics. Inés portrayed them with humour and empathy to highlight the authenticity of their lives that made them different and attractive both humanly and photographically: prostitutes, transsexuals, transvestites, vedettes and any citizen he came across on the street and found visually seductive. Inés asked about the ins and outs of their lives, their reasons and passions talked to them and persuaded them to pose in his studio in exchange for whatever they asked for, sometimes a sandwich.
Javier Inés’s archive has this duality between the most ‘modern’ and triumphant Barcelona, the prelude to the Olympics, and the underworld in which other artists also moved, who, like him, sought the strength of life on the edge. As Javier Inés said: ‘I think my characters are happy. I think they accept their destiny. And I try to make their faces humorous and funny. I am not satisfied with simply making a photograph, a portrait. I want to go further, to bring out a mystery, some magic’.
