Aitor Ortiz’s work has been intimately related to architecture, to the extent that it has been buildings and structures of all kinds, repeatedly observed from the most diverse angles, that have been the focus of attention of almost all his photographs, even those in which the subject has ceased to be recognizable.

However, his photographs are not merely illustrative, nor are they conceived for the greater glory of architecture. On the contrary, their real interest lies in what the author himself defines as “dilemmas between representation and interpretation” of the original referents.

Photography, understood as a medium, was an essential tool for Gaudí’s university learning thanks to the discovery of photographic albums of the great expeditions. These sources influenced his heterodox and cosmopolitan vision of architecture and the development of his constructive ingenuity. Photography was for him like a workshop tool, recording and inverting his models made with catenaries to check their final result.

Gaudí’s works have been revisited many times. The saturation of photographs taken of his works has shaped a generalized vision of an excessive, colorful, figurative, expressionist and rather corny architect, but tremendously popular. However, his architecture is much more avant-garde and rich: Gaudí went from neoclassicism to modernity and knew how to incorporate the constructive advances motivated by the second industrial evolution.

The review of his work through millions of photographs available in publications and on the Internet has imposed itself in a vulgar and repetitive way to the direct experience with his work and, consequently, has caused a trivialization effect in the dissemination of his works.

This series, carried out interruptedly for more than four years, flees from any preconceived idea about Gaudí’s work. It is a clean and complete review of his most significant works. The photographic work focuses especially on his creative process, the laboratory of genius, where he materialized his designs and his models, which are deliberately presented at the same level as the built work.
The ambiguity and synthesis of Aitor Ortiz’s images make us distance ourselves from the “here and now” to become representations of constructed, designed or simply imagined spaces.

By photographing Gaudí’s architectural work, Aitor Ortiz does not cease to be who he was or who he is, for he has managed to find a Gaudí parallel to the spectacular one that amazes us with its forms and chromaticism. The black and white look of the Basque photographer invites us to know another Gaudí that is no less than the previous one, although it has not been observed with thoroughness: a more subtle and delicate Gaudí, a barely imperceptible Gaudí, almost secret, a Gaudí that goes unnoticed among the fanciful creations of his undulating imagination.

Aitor Ortiz’s camera is an eye that reveals what is visible, yet invisible to an eye overwhelmed and exhausted by a story overflowing with narrative richness.