Miguel de Guzmán

Trained as an architect, Miguel de Guzmán is an architectural photographer, filmmaker and digital artist. In 2008, he co-founded Imagen Sublimal studio, based in Madrid and New York, commissioned by most important Spanish architecture offices and published in numerous books and magazines. His original, often offbeat vision of architecture tends to push his practice towards the artistic sphere. He is also one of the few directors of architecture films, in which poetry and humor are intertwined.

Miguel de Guzmán’s photographs have been exhibited at Circuitos de Arte Joven, Galeria Vírgenes and Photo España, and his films shown at MAXXI Rome, Centre Pompidou, Santiago de Chile Architecture Film Festival, Budapest Architecture Film Festival, New York Architecture Film Festival and Seoul Architecture Film Festival.

In 2011, Miguel de Guzmán set off to explore the vast abandoned site of what was to have been the aquatic center for the Madrid Olympic Games in 2012, then 2016, then 2020... Three unsuccessful bids that weighed heavily on the city council's funds and left a 22,000-square-meter unfinished construction. The concrete, metal and glass structure designed by Juan José Medina arch. was to house four pools and accommodate up to 17,000 spectators. Miguel de Guzmán returned with photographs soiled by pending metal frames, remnants of scaffolding, forgotten construction waste, damaged facades, and puddles of stagnant water. But the aesthetics of contemporary ruin did not appeal to him. He wanted to tell a different story.

This is the story of Madrid's Olympic dream, quickly transformed into a nightmare. A saga that led the photographer to modify his images and set them in motion: using graphic-editing softwares, he sublimates them, adding water, light, silhouettes...

Miguel de Guzmán challenges the strict documentary nature of photography, asserting its creative possibilities through contact with familiar techniques: the photographer reworks his shots for them to breathe life into neglected infrastructure, lending it an atmosphere oscillating between dream and reality, proposing different levels of interpretation, different layers of the story. An entire narrative in images.

The architecture of the aquatic center was meant to be visionary, but in the end, its photographs became so.