Irene del Pino is a Spanish photographer specializing in landscape and documentary photography, and a graduate of the PIC.A Escuela Internacional Alcobendas PhotoEspaña, with a Master's Degree in Photography at the University of Brighton in the UK, currently a member of the Royal Photographic Society in Madrid and participant in Gijón Photographic Encounters 2022. Her documentary projects "Northern Lights" and "Imperfect" focus on a changing world at the intersection of the industrial past and an unknown future.

 Hello, Irene,

First of all, I would like to thank you for taking the time to tell us about you and your work in this interview.

 To begin, where are you from? Please tell us about yourself and your passions.

I was born in Madrid, although I’ve lived abroad and worked internationally for a long time. My work and life took me to many places, and that makes you to an extent a citizen of the world. But I can’t deny that I also deeply Spanish and love many things in my homeland.

About my interests, my earliest one was reading, and after that came Photography. When I was six, my dad -an amateur photographer- gave me a small Minolta camera, and I started wasting 16 mm rolls. A few years later he upgraded his camera and I found myself with a Pentax and a 50 mm lens. There are other things I love, such as classical music, or sailing, but Photography has been there all along.

Of all the genres, why were you drawn to documentary photography? What is the intention of your art, your mission in photography?

There are two things that attract me to documentary photography. First, the world today has an accelerated speed of change, as we haven’t seen in previous ages. That deserves documenting.

On the other hand, societal change marginalizes and abandons the old and the unskilled. Our Western Society is enormously rich and advanced, but more and more people are left under the poverty line or become marginalized because they lack the abilities, the education, or both, to adapt… or because they decide to leave voluntarily, and live apart. That also deserves documenting.

Please share with us what photographic equipment you use (camera, lenses, lighting..)?

I use two sets of gear. My main one is light and very mobile. It is composed of two Leica cameras -both bought second hand-: an M9 with an old CCD Kodak sensor, and an M10r, one mounted with a 50 mm Summicron, and the other with a 28 and a 75 mm.

I also use a Medium Format Leica S2 -an old camera also with a CCD Kodak sensor- for work that requires more pause and study.

With the "Northern Lights" project illustrating nocturnal photography works carried out in the large ports of the Bay of Biscay you have been a finalist in the Photojournalism Awards of the Santa María de Albarracín Foundation, first classified in the 2020 Gijón Photographic Encounters and you were selected for an individual exhibition by the Alcobendas Art Center in 2021. What can you tell us about this project and what do you want to convey through your work?

Northern Lights was my first formal project. I was still at Photography School and visited a large retrospective exhibition about a leading Spanish photographer, Carlos Canovas. The exhibition included a series titled “Paisaje sin Retorno” taken at the Bilbao River estuary, part of a broader initiative to document Bilbao before a large urban transformation project started in 1994. This initiative, Ria de Hierro, was similar to other in Europe, all inspired in the American New Topographics School, such as the very large French DATAR Mission in the 80s with Gabriele Basilico among others, or the one done in Barcelona with Laguillo before the 92 Olympics. I thought I would love to do something like that. At Photography School our yearly project had to fall under the very broad subject “Night”, and I decided to photograph the large industrial ports in the Bay of Biscay -at night-.

At the time I thought that I was doing a landscape project. Today I realize that it can be better categorized as Documentary Landscape, as it documents environments and lifestyles that are quickly disappearing and will no longer exist in a few years. It is an exercise in Memory.

In 2019 you started a project in the north of Spain on the decline of coal mining in the regions of La Robla, Guardo, and Langreo and later in others, a decline that has a significant impact on these areas and on the human factor. What can you tell us about your “Imperfect” project? What do you think about the impact of your documentary work?

For me, it’s important that my projects act as a call of attention over the subjects I broach. At the time, I was thinking about completing a project near my former US hometown: a Midwest small town where the local factory closure had created a vicious cycle of poverty and abandonment. My personal circumstances at the time made it very difficult to run it (it is a project that I still intend to complete one day). Then I read about the closure of three coal powerplants in the North of Spain and thought that this was an interesting subject. In each place -first the towns where the plants were located, then others, as I expanded into areas where mines or ancillary industries had closed, sometimes long ago I found devastation and abandonment. That’s the reason of the title, Imperfect. Some places are now recovering thanks to small local initiatives. I covered that, too, and it is a glimpse of hope.

Regions with an industrial past are constantly changing, either through degradation or, conversely, development.  All this happens over a long period of time. Have you thought about continuing to document these regions in the coming years?

Yes, now I am completing the first installment of a project that I would like to keep working on for a longer time. And I may come back and revisit some of my previous projects and see how things are evolving. You must allow time pass to see meaningful change, but I intend to revisit them.

The Gijón Photographic Encounters 2020 event was attended by such leading names as José Manuel Navia, Chema Madoz, Isabel Muñoz, and the renowned José María Mellado and Rafael Trobat. Your work was exhibited at the Barjola Museum, in a collection of authors awarded in the 2019 edition of "New Talent Scholarship", a collection curated by Sandra Balsells. What can you tell us about this renowned annual photographic meeting and your participation in this event?

I submitted to the 2019 edition and was delighted to hear that Northern Lights had been ranked the lead project. It was my first important award. In 2020, due to the Pandemic, the Festival was virtual, and although the work was exhibited at the Museum visits were forbidden due to health reasons. Like everything that year, it was somewhat surreal. But I am very thankful to the organizers of the festival, who did everything they could. And this year, Northern Lights has been exhibited in Gijon, thanks to them.

Please share with us your favorite photographers you admire, why, and how did they influence your photographic journey?

Which of your own photographs do you prefer and why? Please tell us the story behind it.

There are many whom I admire and have influenced me. In Spain, of course Canovas, and others such as Laguillo, Navia, Mellado, Fontcuberta, Isabel Muñoz, Castro Prieto… Perez Siquier, of course. Internationally, pure documentalists such as Walker Evans who initiated the genre, and those of the recent generation such as Stephane Lavoué, Tamas Dezso or Nadav Kander, who are doing a new, different kind of documentary.

In the US the list is very long: Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, Sally Mann, Anthony Hernandez, Richard Michrag… of course Friedlander, Winogrand, Diane Arbus (about whom I wrote an essay and later my dissertation). And lately, as I expanded my interest to tableaux and scenes, the work of Jeff Wall and Crewdson.

I also must mention, inevitably, the German landscape tradition initiated by Bernd and Hilla Becher and their disciples (out of which I am especially interested in Struth, and Gurski also).

Which photograph do you prefer and why? Tell us the story behind it.

There’s always photographs I like better, and a few I have at home. For instance, I have one of an early 1900s coal powerplant, which was included in Imperfect, and another of London taken from a pier in the East End, where the rich city ends and the edgelands start, which is included in my latest work. But it’s more about projects than individual images. They are part of my work for a reason, an indexical or a symbolic value, and their role in a story. I don’t really have a favorite photograph.

How do you imagine the evolution of your artistic work and your figure as an artist in the future?

Although I’ve photographed most of my life, I became a professional photographer quite late. Hence, I don’t expect a typical career path. I am interested in my work being shown, both in Spain and elsewhere, but I don’t have any ambition beyond being a good documentary photographer that does interesting work.

With regards to how I see my work in the future, I would like to continue being a witness, particularly on two topics. First, the people who voluntarily leave the modern urban society thinking “This is not for me and I don’t want it”. Second, those who are marginalized by technology and change and end up in the edges for lack of skills and education. That is what I want to keep doing, through portraiting them and their environment.