Author: Jaume Salvà

There are photobooks that arrive perfumed with prestige and die on the table after ten minutes. Sancti Spiritus is not one of them. Ana Amado’s book, published by La Fábrica in 2026, gathers 60 images across 128 pages and is accompanied by an unpublished text by Lara Moreno. Its subject is the cloistered Dominican community of the Monasterio de Sancti Spiritus in Toro, Zamora, where Amado lived and photographed for several days after first entering the monastery in 2019.

What thrilled me most is that Amado does not photograph this world as if she were dusting a reliquary. She photographs it as something alive. That matters. Too many books about enclosed, sacred, or supposedly “mysterious” spaces end up embalming their subject under a layer of solemn good taste. Here, the intelligence is elsewhere. The photographs breathe because they accept instability. Slight blur, imperfect focus, unexpected crops, off-centre bodies, frames that look almost stolen rather than ceremonially composed: all of that gives the work pulse. What a novelty—photography that remembers life is untidy.

And yet none of this feels careless. That is the trick, and it is not a minor one. The book has technical control without technical vanity. Amado knows exactly how far she can let an image loosen before it collapses. Her blur is expressive, not decorative. Her casual framings are not the usual fake-spontaneous nonsense that many photographers use when they want to look modern without risking anything. They are decisions. They create the sensation of being inside a lived rhythm rather than in front of a polished thesis about spirituality.

That compositional freedom becomes even more interesting because Amado comes from architecture and has spoken about wanting to move away from idealized, “god’s-eye” imagery toward a closer, human perception of space. In her work, architecture is not a pristine object but the stage on which life happens, and she is also drawn to making the invisible more visible. That is exactly what gives Sancti Spiritus its nerve: cloisters, windows, thresholds, corridors and cells are never just backdrops. They press against the figures, frame their gestures, absorb their silences. Space here has weight, but it also has intimacy.

There is also something deeply elegant in the refusal to overexplain. The book trusts the image. It trusts that a body half seen, a face turned away, a passage cut by shadow, or a moment softened by movement can say more than the blunt literalism of the perfectly descriptive shot. That trust is rare. It requires talent, yes, but also nerve. Most people prefer to show everything and reveal nothing. Amado does the opposite.

I came away from Sancti Spiritus exhilarated. Not because it flatters the eye in the obvious way, but because it understands a harder truth: grace in photography often enters through the side door, a little out of focus, badly centred, and completely sure of itself.

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I made this in Ciutadella because the street was almost too well mannered. Clean walls, hard light, the usual old-town theatre pretending to be timeless. Very nice. Very dignified. Very close to becoming dead on arrival.

Then the cyclist came through and saved the thing.

What mattered was not getting him sharp. Sharpness would have killed it. I wanted the smear, the wobble, the face slipping away, the bicycle stretched into a black nervous scribble. The street stays put, like all respectable stonework does. The man does not. That small clash is the photograph.

Places like Ciutadella are dangerous for photographers because they offer beauty cheaply. And cheap beauty usually produces boring pictures for people who enjoy nodding solemnly in front of walls. I’d rather keep the friction. I’d rather have a frame that looks as if life passed through it and refused to pose.

This one is not elegant. Good. Street photography should not always smell of good manners.

Technical note: Ricoh GR IV Monochrome, Provoke-style recipe, hard contrast and blur used on purpose, which is still a scandal to people who worship clean files.

There are scenes that ask for admiration, and others that ask for suspicion. This one asked for both. A street performer had turned himself into a monument to bad decisions and raw balance, hanging over a dirt bike as if gravity had briefly resigned from public service. To the right, a passerby looked back with that expression people wear when reality becomes slightly impolite.

What interested me was not the trick alone. Tricks are cheap; cities are full of them. What mattered was the small crack in the theatre. The rider is all strain, weight and silence, while the boy walking past gives the frame its real measure. One body is pretending to be sculpture. The other is simply trying to get on with the day. That friction is the photograph. The city, as usual, refuses to collaborate neatly.

I shot it with the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome because this kind of image does not need cosmetic charm. It needs nerve. The harsh whites, the swallowed blacks, the rough pavement and the wall with all the tenderness of a bureaucratic slap were doing enough already. I only had to keep the frame wide, let the emptiness breathe, and wait for the glance. Without that glance, it is a street act. With it, it becomes a small civic absurdity.

My decision was simple: keep the performer dominant, but leave enough dead space for the second figure to sting the image awake. Provoke was never about cleanliness. It was about tension, abrasion, and the feeling that the world is always half a second away from becoming rude.

Ricoh GR IV Monochrome recipe: my “poor manners” Provoke preset

Use this as a starting point, not a religion. Religions are already doing enough damage.

Image control: High contrast.
Contrast: +3 or +4.
Highlight contrast: +1.
Shadow contrast: +4.
Sharpness / clarity: +1 at most, never too polished.
Grain: strong.
Noise reduction: low or better off. Let the file breathe badly.
Exposure compensation: -0.7 EV as a default base in daylight.
ISO: Auto, with a ceiling around 6400.
Metering: highlight-weighted or whatever keeps whites from dying completely.
Focus: snap focus, around to 2 m.
Focal length: native wide view; don’t overthink it. The camera is not your therapist.
Framing rule: leave uncomfortable negative space and let one element disturb the main subject.
Editing rule: no editing.

I liked Archivo Nómada 82–86 for a reason that is not particularly refined. It is alive. That may sound like one of those phrases people use when they do not want to say anything precise, but here it is exact. There are books of photographs that are correct, serious, well produced, and dead as a municipal speech. This one is not. This one moves. It breathes badly, sometimes. It looks at you with the eyes of someone who has slept little and seen too much. That already sets it apart from a great many respectable photobooks, which are usually very well behaved and therefore tedious.

Alberto García-Alix does not photograph as if he were applying for permission. He photographs as if life were happening in front of him and he had better not blink. The result is not a collection of “important images,” which is what lesser photographers and worse editors are always trying to manufacture. It is something harder to fake: a body of work with pulse. Not prestige. Pulse.

What I admire most is that these photographs do not seem to have been made to explain anything. They are not there to illustrate an era like those books people put together once history has done the vulgar part and turned pain into cultural heritage. No. These pictures still have bad manners. They come from proximity, from loyalty to what was lived, from that dangerous point where affection and lucidity manage, against all odds, to occupy the same frame.

And that changes everything. Because when a photographer is really inside what he photographs, the image loses that thin layer of vanity that ruins so much contemporary work. There is no touristic misery here, no decorative darkness, no rebellion packaged for people who enjoy saying “raw” in a gallery with clean toilets and decent lighting. García-Alix does not aestheticise life from the outside. He is in it up to the neck. One can tell. It gives the pictures a weight that style alone never gives.

There is youth in these pages, of course, but not the kind institutions like to remember. Not youth as slogan, perfume or alibi. This is youth with its defects intact: bravado, desire, fatigue, vanity, tenderness, recklessness, beauty without hygiene. Faces that still seem to be deciding whether to laugh, disappear or get into trouble. Rooms that look as though they have heard too much. Bodies that are not symbols of anything especially noble, which is fortunate, because symbols are usually where truth goes to die.

The remarkable thing is that the book never collapses into disorder. It could have. The material is excessive, emotional, unstable. Yet the sequence holds. García-Alix has that rare instinct for rhythm that cannot be taught by critics, curators or other people who make a living from explaining what they would never know how to do. He knows when an image has to hit you straight on and when it should remain at the side, watching, like someone smoking in silence while the room finishes saying what it has to say.

That is why the book stays with you. Not because it wants to impress you, but because it refuses to flatter you. It does not ask to be admired for being brave, or historical, or legendary. It simply places a world in front of you and lets the world keep its rough edges. Which is rarer than it should be. Most people, once they get near an archive, start embalming things. García-Alix does the opposite. He opens the drawer and lets the animal breathe.

I finished the book with a feeling I distrust and value equally: gratitude. Gratitude, first, because the photographs are so free of fraud. And gratitude, too, because books like this remind one of an awkward truth: photography matters when it stops trying to be culture and goes back to being necessity. When it ceases to decorate and begins to witness. When it is not worried about looking intelligent because it is too busy looking hard.

There is also, I admit, a small element of humiliation in the pleasure. A book like this leaves many contemporary images looking what they are: tidy, timid things, beautifully packaged and spiritually underfed. Very presentable. Very empty. García-Alix is not empty. He may be excessive, stubborn, nocturnal, sentimental when it hurts and cruel when needed. Better that. Much better. At least one is in the company of a human being.

And that, in the end, is what I loved. Not the myth, not the period, not the cultural varnish that other people will be eager to apply to it. I loved the lack of permission in it. The lack of deodorant. The feeling that someone had gone through life with the camera close to the chest and the eyes open, which is still more difficult than many would like to admit.

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