Spanish-Catalan born Marian Alonso, studied photography at the Institut d’Estudis Fotografics de Catalunya, Barcelona (Spain). After graduating in 2003 she moved to London where she has lived since. She completed a master’s degree in Fine Art Photography from London School of Communication in 2012 and is a recipient of the ARCO (Ifema) Photography Award which involved working in Madrid on a collaborative project, supported by the Spanish Arts & Culture Department. Other nominations include Best of Association of Photographers Award and finalist of the Sproxton Award for Photography by the University of the Arts London.
Marian expresses her creative vision through both commercial and personal work, in portraiture, reportage and fashion. A lot of her work is figurative in subject and aims to capture meaning and emotion conveyed through human visage and slights of body language. Her personal work often revolves around female identity – a previous project on motherhood led her to develop a series of visual explorations on the subject of (in)fertility in contemporary society at King’s College Hospital’s Assisted Conception Unit in London. Alonso is also working on an audio project about breast feeding – exploring levels of maternal intimacy against the backdrop of the sociopolitical debate about breast feeding in public.
About It’s Always A Bit Weird With Family – words by Marian Alonso:
This autobiographical project looks into the processes of perception against time in the context of memory review towards my family and home left behind in Catalonia when I relocated to London as an adult. Documenting returning visits by blending pensive reality with the playfully staged to rebuild and reassess family connections through metaphor has helped me to explore new definitions of home over time and distance.
“Childhood memories don’t determine adult personality, rather adult personality determines what will be remembered from childhood.” John F. Kihlstrom, cognitive social psychologist, University of California, Berkeley.
