Meet Manu Valcarce, the photographer and social documenter, who recently exhibited ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’ the UNITE-sponsored series about financial equality amongst LGBT in Margate.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m from Madrid, from Spain, I’ve been here since 2007. One day I took my camera and a ticket to go to India and I was there for six months. When I was travelling around Asia I started working with documentary and portraits of people, and now I work in social documentary normally.
How did you get into photography?
I always wanted to do photography but in my family everyone works as doctors. They told me that’s not even a degree, and it wasn’t a degree in Spain at the time. So I studied advertising, then when I came to London away from my family, I decided to pursue photography. I did a short course and my own projects, and I’m now doing a MA in photojournalism.
What would you say is your artistic ethos?
What I do is try and tell stories and normally they are stories with other issues, so you always want to make a change with photography. To make somebody think about an issue, or just so that they can know more about that issue.
And what issues really inspire you?
Normally, it’s more minorities – ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’ is the first time I’ve done LGBT but the other projects I’ve done have been migrant workers that come from India and Bangladesh. How they work in Singapore on construction sites, about the conditions of how they live in Singapore or about their families in India.
How did ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’ come about?
It came about because a friend of mine was thinking to buy a house, and obviously now buying a house in London is impossible for first buyers and so basically she was looking for a house in Margate, which is much cheaper. I also knew some artists who were moving there, because of this new gallery that opened in 2011. My idea was to capture this new community of Margate, in the context of Margate as a social travel and how London has become impossible to live.
And if someone came and saw your work for the first time, what would you want them to leave feeling?
I think I would like them to connect to the people I photograph as I did when I was making the documentary. To empathise with them, in the way that I did.
• To read more about Manu Valcarce and the ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’ series, visit: qxmagazine.kinsta.cloud/blog-event/in-conversation-with-manu-valcarce/
