Today we’d like to introduce you to Joaquim Adrià Pujol. Them and their team share their story with us below:
Joaquim Adrià Pujol is a filmmaker and fine art photographer living and working in Los Angeles. He earned his BFA from the Brooks Institute of Film in 2017 and has worked in the film industry ever since, both locally and internationally. Joaquim’s body of photographic work is an artistic response to the places he encountered and explored during the metamorphic decade of 15- 25 years old.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I lived alone when I was 16 and worked full-time as a dishwasher while finishing high school, I used to work myself so far past the point of exhaustion that I would occasionally pass out and wake up realizing I had lost a day. I got used to not having weekends, days of or time for socializing. I pretty much worked seven days a week for most of the year. My focus was on my art, finishing school and moving to LA. To me at that time, everything else was an unacceptable distraction.
I moved to Ventura at 18 and started film school, my first semester I got the chance to start PA work on indie features. My school was very flexible with class schedules so I was able to go to class two days per week and work on set in LA the rest of the time. Working on set became my entire focus, I could not get enough of it, school and my fine art sorta fell to the periphery for a while. I worked as a grip for a while, then moved into camera department as a 2nd AC. I would watch all the department heads, see what they did, why they did it, what tools they used and how. Then I would go back to school and try to get my hands on the same equipment to re-create the setups. Just trying to piece it all together, I always learn better working with tangible things than studying the theory.
About a year before I graduated my school, Brooks institute closed upruply and that was sorta kick to just move to LA, I had the knowledge now and that’s really all that matters. no one is gone ask for your degree… Out of my class, I think I’m the only one still working in film, maybe there are one or two others but for the most part, everyone has drifted away into other things
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m a director of photography and fine art photographer. Pretty much anything that involves storying with cameras or visual mediums is something I dabble in. mostly what pays the bills these days in commercial cinematography work but I’m trying to balance that out a bit with fine art sales.
A photograph isolates an image in space and time, but it is much more than that. The beholding eye and beating heart behind the camera are present in every shot. I am fascinated by this interaction between our mercurial minds, slippery and fast, and the captured image: a moment that can persist in time and speak to strangers.
Memories are the unreliable messengers of experience, often relying on feelings, assumptions, and filler more than actual events. I distress and alter photographs of my own personal moments, using paint, epoxy, and fire to convey the shimmering quality of the subconscious reaching for meaning in the world. I collage the images into larger pieces to evoke the fragmented scraps of experience that inform our identities and our actions. Burned paint and epoxy continue to oxidize, taking on rust-colored shadows. The finished pieces look different at every moment and every angle. They are not static: they are meant to be portals to a place in the viewer’s own psyche where half-remembered stories live. These pieces speak to the fleeting nature of our existence in the face of eternity, the ways recalled images and events warp, decay, and shift over time: iridescent, haunting, startling.
Do you have any advice for those just starting out?
Don’t be afraid to listen to a bit of your ego.. the inner voice that makes you a bit of a bastard and gives you the confidence to rip out a piece of your soul and put in on the table for others to speculate on. Don’t dilute your self into mediocrity by disappearing into your surroundings.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://joaquim.work
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joaquim.pujol/?hl=en
