Aerial nature

Héctor Garrido has been taking aerial photographs for twenty-five years and his images make up a whole rich world where the search for geometry and the message have set the tone. His series on fractals and the language of the Earth are known worldwide. All his work is done camera in hand, on small planes or helicopters. Héctor does not use drones or remote control cameras.

I am often asked if to use my aerial photographs I use drones or devices that raise the camera over the landscape. And to answer with sincerity, I try to go beyond a simple no and I try to make the questioner understand why such a thing would never be possible.

And so I try to express that my photographs are made with feelings, with dreams and with memories, which are not the landscape in itself but what I feel in it. And in that creative process, although the main ingredient is, of course, the landscape, the character is definitely the work of the wind that at the moment of shooting the photograph hits my face, of the vertigo that at every turn of my plane seems to leave behind the soul, of the own state of exaltation that produces me to be a conscious reader of what the landscape grammar proposes, of the concatenated sensation of the exploration, the search and the final discovery caused by each shot of the camera and finally of the momentary obfuscation provoked by the risk, always present, of being traveling in a dangerous and challenging air environment.

Those are the spices that add flavor to my images.

Something like this can only be experienced up there, hanging from the air, with the body leaning over the landscape and the camera in hand, dancing with the wind, as in a dream.

Héctor Garrido