HOTEL W
At the end of 2015, Rockwell Group asked me to document the transformation of two hotels in central Madrid into a luxury five-star hotel, a project they had begun working on, so as to have an archive of images of the process. I accepted on condition that I could reserve the option of making an exhibition with those images in the future.
In all, I made thirteen visits to the renovation of the hotel, from a place that was beginning to fill with rubble until spring 2023, seven years later, when it was almost ready to open. As a photographer, going there every four or six months was always a mental journey, an exploration of a moment in a place through its photographic image, always seeking to discover and reflect what was happening, what was emerging, and the effect it had on me.
As I always try to do in my work, my approach was neutral, seeking a certain detachment, a distance from what the image shows, in the manner of documentary photography but understanding it as a style. That is, my photographs never give up being something more than a document, in the way of, say, forensic photography. I recognise Walker Evans’s ideas in this.
When the works were finished, I had an archive of more than 2,500 photographs, from which I had selected about 400 to hand over session after session to my client, which by then had become ARVO Arquitectura, a Madrid studio.
At the beginning of 2023 this studio asked me for a selection of images to include in a book they were producing about their work and that of their collaborators. This led me to review the whole series.
What I found was that in many images what I had been looking for was present, and so it could be presented as such: a photographic series with the ambition of being one, that is, in this case, of being at the same time documents of a process and works of art.
This exhibition at Galería Pilares grows out of that concept: showing there a selection of photographs from this series, entitled Hotel W from the outset, which we consider most suitable for an exhibition project connecting the documentary use of photography with other, more expressive and personal uses.
The series consists of 24 photographs. Two of them are framed (white box frame) at 70 x 100 cm, and four more, framed in the same way, at 30 x 40 cm. A further eighteen photographs, also 30 x 40 cm, will be mounted directly on the wall without frames.
Miguel Santesmases
2024
