What struck me at Camera Work was not just the quality of the photographs or the privilege of seeing in large format images I had been looking at in books and reproductions for years. It was discovering that they were still alive. That they didn't lose intensity when going from printed paper or screen to the real print. On the contrary. They grew. They became deeper, more human, harder to forget.
With Lindbergh, something very particular had always happened to me. He interested me on all levels at once. As a photographer, of course, but also as a way of being in the world. I was drawn to his way of seeing, his rejection of empty artifice, his defense of a less adorned and more genuine beauty. Fashion, in his best images, seemed almost an excuse. The important thing was the person. The tension between vulnerability and presence. The possibility of someone truly revealing themselves in front of the camera.
That was what impressed me most about him and what still stays with me today: that ability to reach an intimate place without needing to dramatize it. Even in large productions, even with women who had already become absolute icons, there was something bare, direct, emotionally clean. As if the photograph wasn't about manufacturing a perfect image, but about waiting for a truth to emerge.
And perhaps that's why that visit was so important. Because it didn't just move me as a spectator. It put me in order internally. I had started an art gallery in Gijón in 2005, a space born out of a very deep need to do something that intensely called to me at that time. But when I returned from Berlin, I understood that this space had to change. That it made more sense to turn it into a photo gallery. My professional life was already deeply linked to images, and that visit to Camera Work gave me radical clarity.
Immediately after returning, I began to transform the project. Not just in the type of exhibitions, but in the way they were presented and communicated. The posters, the graphics, the price lists, the website, the dossiers, the invitations: everything leveled up because for the first time I had seen up close a model that combined good judgment, beauty, and professionalism without losing its soul. My space in Gijón changed after Berlin. And it largely changed, after Lindbergh.
