Sobre Bernardo Aja
Bernardo Aja (Santander, 1973)
With a childhood and adolescence spent in the provinces and immersed in the everyday life of a summer city, at the age of nineteen his life took an effervescent leap and he began a journey through America that continues to this day.
After studying Fine Arts at Santa Monica College and the University of Los Angeles, California, UCLA, he traveled to New York, the metropolis of the moment, as an assistant to photographers, and then began a solo career, giving accents to his career in different forms. Instinctively, he has always reacted very personally to the development of his life and education, mainly taking photos of displaced characters and seemingly inconsequential little things. "I have covered different areas, from a South American dictator from the nineties, through decadent Hispanic heritage aristocrats, communities of black people lost on the coasts of the Mexican Pacific or mothers looking for their disappeared children in Sinaloa and Veracruz, to portraits of fighting bulls in Mexico and village bullfighters who mend their costumes and hitchhike to get to Comala."
The countries where he lives, mostly in Latin America, have created a rich photographic universe of uprooted outsiders and marginalized characters disconnected from the modern world. His most extensive project, "EntreMuros," specifically deals with the legacy of Spanish migrants from the 16th to the 19th centuries, the forgotten ones, those who lost all the revolutions, the descendants of Spaniards and Creoles. They are existentially pessimistic photos, imbued with a sense of ironic humor. As you stroll alongside the photos, the viewer captures the mood and gestures of these characters and delights in their extravagant and absurd ideas.
Elena Poniatowska writes in a text she wrote for the exhibition of these images at the Casa de América in 2019, that these characters attract the photographer "because they swim against the current and like salmon, they make an unheard-of effort to swim upstream and overcome that torrent of water that is ready to annihilate them."
