Xavier Guardans “Self-Portraits”

Waterhouse & Dodd

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In his latest book, Self-Portraits, Barcelona-born American fine art photographer Xavier Guardans offers an intimate portrait of powerful female artists in natural settings around the world for this poignant exploration of light, nature and the human form. Created over a decade, the images are accompanied by the subjects’ voices, conveying the confidence of women in the 21st century.

Guardans’ Self-Portraits is a photography book rooted in the European artistic traditions of the landscape and nude, yet informed by a contemporary perspective. Comprised of 46 singular black-and- white images, Self-Portraits features the female form—singularly and collectively—in remote locations throughout the world, including Kenya, Japan and North America. Self-Portraits marks Guardans’ third collaboration with publisher Damiani, which released Traveling Lights (2015) and Windows (2014).

The women represented in Self-Portraits are simultaneously strong and vulnerable, their bodies exposed to harsh desert, aquatic and ice-covered environments. Guardans is perpetually drawn to far-flung places, shooting on location with only natural light and demonstrating an extraordinary eye for compositions that reveal universal truths. The subjects and scenery of Self-Portraits, in Guardans’ unique treatment, become timeless abstractions of form, texture and geometry.

In Self-Portraits, the muse meets modern womanhood. The work subverts the common roles of photographer and subject, resulting in a powerful blend of creative energies, authors and masculine and feminine identities. The nudes are accomplished female artists in their own rights—a painter, a visual artist, a singer-songwriter, a dancer and a chef. Their portraits are accompanied by personal narratives in which they recount their experience working with Guardans, reflecting on the opportunity to connect with nature and the relationship between his means of creative expression and their own.

Xavier Guardans was born in Barcelona in 1954 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated with distinction from Bournemouth College of Art in England and has been included in exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Madrid, Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca and the Museu d’ Art Espanyol Contemporani in Palma. His work is held in private and public collections, including at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and the Center of Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. Guardans has also had an extensive commercial career publishing his work in major magazines and worldwide advertising campaigns. His previous publications include Traveling Lights (2015) and Windows (2014), also published by Damiani.