I think I started going between 2012 and 2013, and I repeated several editions after that. Some trips I took completely alone. I would take a flight during the week, arrive in Paris, and treat myself to two, three, or four days of absolute concentration: fair, galleries, strolls, bookstores, cafes, more fair. There was something very beautiful about that chosen solitude. After spending hours looking at artwork, going out for a walk in Paris had almost the same value as being inside. The city prolonged the inner state that the fair had brought you to.
What impressed me was not just the quality, but the scale. It wasn't a specific exhibition by a photographer you admired. It was corridors and corridors and corridors where mythical names, different registers, different eras, different sensibilities coexisted. There were the images I had pursued for years in books and magazines: Peter Lindbergh, Annie Leibovitz, Mario Testino, Helmut Newton, Nick Knight, Paolo Roversi, Ellen von Unwerth, Mondino. Not as abstract references, but as physical pieces, measured, edited, with prices, with presence, with weight. Paris Photo began at the Carrousel du Louvre and later moved to the Grand Palais, a move that helped further consolidate its international dimension.
For me, that confirmed something essential: fashion photography could occupy a legitimate space within art and collecting. This certainty had been building long before, in the years when I traveled to Berlin to see Camera Work or the Helmut Newton universe, or to London to attend exhibitions that seemed unthinkable in Spain. Camera Work, founded in 1997, became one of the leading European galleries for photography, and Tim Walker's "Story Teller" exhibition at Somerset House, held between 2012 and 2013, was further proof that outside of Spain, this dialogue between fashion, image, and art was alive and recognized.
Looking back, everything seems quite clear. Those years of obsessive study, the trips, the fairs, the exhibitions, the bookstores, even the frustration of not being able to buy almost anything, connected the dots. All that self-taught research not only fed my perspective but later helped me teach Communication and Photography to third-year fashion students at ESNE, then an affiliated center of Camilo José Cela University. I didn't come from an academic background in that field: I arrived there with my own journey, built on curiosity, searching, and years of personal immersion in imagery. I couldn't take those works with me, but I always found another way to get close to them: a catalog, a poster, a book. That's how my collection grew. And also a way of seeing that, in time, would eventually push me to convert a gallery in Gijón into a photo gallery and to organize exhibitions based on that same conviction.
