Óscar Monzón

Based in Madrid, Óscar Monzón (1981) founded the Blank Paper collective in 2003 and developed different projects since then. In 2006 he received a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Culture to conclude the project Las Puertas de París and in 2011 he was finalist in PHotoEspaña´s Descubrimientos award. After five years of work, he completed the series Karma, a work about the relationship between man and machine for which he received the First Book Award of Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation in 2013. He says about his work: «The title is Maya and it refers to the Sanskrit term which is translated as illusion or unreality. I had this idea: When you look at something through a camera and then translate it into an image, spaces can become scenarios and people or situations can be seen as performers or staged moments. Based on that I started to work taking street pictures and trying to find the influence of advertising fictions on reality. At the same time I took pictures directly from billboards and I put these together with the “real” pictures to allow a dialogue (…) like a boomerang game».