East & West is the result of Julio Estrada's trip through Turquia during 2006. The set is made up of panoramic views made in black and white with a Hasselblad XPAN camera, where documentary and artistic criteria harmonize in the record of life daily life of the Turkish man. During a nearly fifteen-day tour of different cities in this country —Istanbul, Ankara, Cappadocia, Konya, Manavgat, Pamukkale, Ephesus, Izmir and Bursa—, the need to fully understand and delve into the region led him to different proposals where the veracity of the record coexist, transparent and unmodified —which documents a circumstance where the photographer is only a curious gaze—, together with the aesthetic intention of the visionary who seeks to make an artistic testimony of that moment.

    The integration of the author in the context of what he is trying to document, without taking his eyes off the viewer for a moment for fear of losing the unique opportunity to capture those moments, has been the most valuable tool during this journey. A commitment to the subject, an always attentive camera and a compositional awareness of the event, have fostered these urban and rural landscapes that speak of nature and the way of life of its people, in an attempt to coexist with diversity and shorten distances. geographic and cultural.

    Completely natural scenes let you feel the climate of these lands. Others, immersed in the city rhythm, portray the daily life, the architecture and the trades of the inhabitants. In some moments, the selection of the most opportune moment to take the photo makes the composition so cinematic that it is possible to hear the noise of a dovecote taking flight, or the agitation of a crowd of people looking at the sky surprised at an eclipse. In other images, time seems stopped, distracted between the laughter of some children who still do not reflect the future on their faces.

    There are cases where a frame whose visual weight is assigned to the surrounding elements of the main scene is proposed, thus acquiring a narrative prominence. These elements invite the viewer to reconstruct the real or imaginary situation that the lens has left out. Each detail chosen to be part of the composition constitutes an autonomous discourse, but it also becomes a clue to decipher that hidden story or to write that is protected in each of these photographs.

(Hp5 film, Xpan camera and Nikon 9000 scanner were used for this series)