"CHINA, just a few moments". Gràcia de la Hoz. February/March 2024
Gràcia de la Hoz has a long career in photography that begins in the mid-70s and very soon joins the Agrupació Fotogràfica Reus where she is introduced to the world of the photographic laboratory, competitions and creative photography. Over the years, from the beginnings with black and white photography, it goes through the slide and at the end of the 90s it begins in the incipient digital world with photos scanned and subsequently treated with Photoshop until the definitive introduction to digital photography in year 2004. He has practiced the most diverse photographic subjects from reportage, collage, digital photomontages and in recent years his work has gone towards portraiture and still life.
The first notable prize of his career is the Premi Ciutat de Reus de Fotografia in 1994. Since then he has won more than 80 prizes in international exhibitions with more than 850 selected works and more than 260 prizes in national exhibitions. Notably, in 2016 he won the Mo-tse Photography Master Award at the 6th International Biennial of Photography in Jinan, China. He has participated in more than 35 group exhibitions in Catalonia, Spain, Latvia, Turkey, Ireland and Italy and also more than 35 individual exhibitions in Catalonia, Spain, Slovenia, China and France. He has acted as a jury member in more than 90 national and 75 international exhibitions. His works have also been published in several photographic magazines and he has collaborated in ten books. This entire career has earned him numerous national and international recognitions, so he is an Honorary Member of the Federació Catalana de Fotografia, HonFCF, Master FCF 1*, Platinum Jury of the FCF. For the Confederación Española de Fotografía, CEF is CEF Artist and CEF Silver Jury. Finally, he is a member of the International Federation of Photographic Art, FIAP, and has the FIAP Gold, EFIAP/g Excellence awards and the title of FIAP Master, MFIAP, which is the highest recognition given by FIAP for his photographic career from an author It should be noted that she is the first woman in Spain and, for now, the only one to obtain this distinction. If you want to know the author better: www.graciadelahoz.com
The exhibition "China, just a few moments"
With this exhibition the author presents us with another photographic facet which is reportage, life on the streets, people and their immediate surroundings, their homes, all in a rural setting. Even so, it is also, mainly, a display of portraits of people, a subject that the author has worked on very intensively in recent years. We could therefore also frame the exhibition within such a classic theme in photography as the portrait that is presented to us in a square format that the author uses quite often and which allows her to better focus the models within the image. The exhibition was created during a photographic trip to China in 2017. It is not intended to be a report on the so-called Asian giant. As the title itself suggests, it only aims to reflect moments lived in a somewhat remote area of the People's Republic of China. Despite having also visited large cities and even the capital Beijing and some elements of monumental China, he finally decided to reflect brief moments of the daily life of some small rural communities in Guizhou province located in the south west of China whose capital is Guiyang. This province is relatively poor, with the lowest GDP per capita in China, economically underdeveloped but rich in natural, environmental and cultural resources. Demographically, Guizhou is one of the most diverse provinces in China. The Miao and Yao minority groups make up more than 37% of the population. There he was able to share these small moments in a completely rural environment with very welcoming people who proudly showed him their simple life and let him share for a while their family life, opening the doors of their home. This very familiar treatment allowed him to get close to people and, despite the difficulty with the language, to be able to capture people closely. In short, he tried to capture and transmit through his images the essence of simple life in a rural world in a small corner of China, so it is a tiny sample of this immense country. "Just a few moments" refers to the instant it takes to capture an image with a still camera. It only takes a moment to immortalize what happens in a certain place at a precise moment. The author shows us these moments from the prism of her expert and attentive gaze.
