Claudio Campo-Garcia, the Photo-Explorer
Claudio is 18, hails from Columbia and has been taking photos forever. He is one of those kids that seem to pop up everywhere the moment you start to notice them.
Up to now he has been featured in the pages of Vice, either as a model or as a photographer. At this point most of his stuff can be found on Facebook and MySpace. But we have the feeling that this is going to change soon. It’s very likely he’ll be discovered by some big-shot photography/fashion/model agent and his work will be auctioned off at Christie’s or some other artsy place. But seriously, he is really good.
He has collaborated with the likes of Nils Dunkel and others in the fashion-wunderkind scene. His work is spontaneous and direct. He seems to constantly document his lifestyle and that of his friends with pictures that are brutally honest and pretty at the same time.
It is nice to meet someone who is as down to earth and real as Claudio is, even though he’s part of the fashion circus. Although he could be hanging out with supermodels and starlets, he’d rather take pictures of misfits and people that are not mainstreamy.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he started taking photos since he was about eight, which is, in the pre-digital camera era, really young. Although around that time he didn’t have any idea of what it was he was doing, he really only wanted to be a ‘mad scientist’ when he grew up. Then the ages of wisdom started to kick in, and he wanted to become a photo journalist, but then that kind of faded into just taking photos.
Although the idea of photo journalism is never far away, one big project he wants to realize is documenting the whole drug problem in Columbia. But as Claudio says: “For now I just want to go to university, I don’t want to get killed yet.”
When I asked him how he gets the ideas for his photos, his answer was very simple:
“Usually I kind of always just take pictures, without much of a project idea. While I’m shooting, I always find a certain atmosphere and then it ends up being a series. I’m not the kind of ‘sitting at my desk, thinking out photo stories’ photographer.
But even if it’s so spontaneous, I really like setting everything up on the set. I’m really a perfectionist in that way. That’s also why I like working with old, manual, analogue cameras, because you really have to find the perfect settings.”
Here is more of his stuff:
