Ira Lombardía
A life among images
In the era of hyper-visuality—the saturation of images typical of contemporary society—, Ira Lombardía delves into photographs from a critical perspective. Her work, based on researching and recycling, deals with themes like feminism, environmental issues or memory and ranges from collages to sculpture. An artistic practice that she combines with her other great passion, teaching.
The artistic practice of Ira Lombardía (Pola de Laviana, Asturias, 1977) revolves around images, but her purpose is not to create new ones in a world that is saturated with them. This is how she tells it: “My work is related to photography, but not in the traditional sense. Those who know my work know that I have a critical approach to the medium. The focus is not taking photographs, but rather questioning photography.” For this reason, even though Ira dislikes labels, she prefers to be called a “visual artist.” A perspective that has been strongly influenced by another Spanish photographer, Joan Fontcuberta. “Joan has been crucial in my life and I am lucky to call him a friend. He has been my mentor and a huge inspiration. He is one of those people who invites you to rethink photography,” admits Ira who, as a child, had other role models: her father—she is the daughter of painter and sculptor Miguel Ángel Lombardía—. Art, therefore, is part of her roots, even though she almost gave up on it due to the influence of those who made her fall in love with it. Knowing how hard an artist’s life can be, her parents pushed her to study Law. And she did, without losing sight of her passion. She never worked as a lawyer because she soon spread her artistic wings to start a career that she has combined with her other great passion, teaching. She currently teaches at Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts in the state of New York.
Based on your subsequent career, no one would say that you studied Law. Was art always there or was it a revelation?
My family is artistic, so I’ve been trained from a young age. My parents were concerned about my artistic tendencies because they know how tough it is to make a living out of art. They told me I couldn’t study Fine Arts. My other choice was Philosophy, but they refused that also, so in the end I studied Law because it provided more opportunities. I then did a master’s degree in art to work on the curatorial side, but I specialized in new media. I’d already spent several years practicing photography, but that was when I started my own artistic practice.
An artist’s career is like a marathon. How have you experienced this process?
Seeing what an artist’s career is like at home helped me to understand its complexity. I’ve always known it’s a long-distance race, for extremely patient people. Art is not an occupation, it’s a lifestyle. When you are younger, it’s easier to reconcile art with life because you can take on the sacrifices involved more easily. Then comes the time when you have to reconcile your career with the realities of life, like starting a family or having a mortgage, which are also built day by day. This was the hardest turning point for me. If you feel passionate about what you do, you find the way to carry on.
“Art is not an occupation, it’s a lifestyle. When you are younger, it’s easier to reconcile art with life because you can take on the sacrifices involved more easily”
At times, you have confessed to feeling more comfortable being called a “visual artist” than a “photographer.” Why?
First, I don’t like labels. They oversimplify and reduce the field in which you carry out your work. Photography has always been a common thread for me, both in theory and in practice, but I work with other media, like sculpture. I relate to art as a whole and collaborate with multidisciplinary galleries. Sometimes it seems like different fields can touch but not blend together, and that’s absurd. For example, I’ve been lucky to collaborate with PHotoESPAÑA on several occasions and I feel really comfortable.
Your artistic career is intricately connected to your teaching. What is the most interesting thing about this balance for you?
Both careers have developed simultaneously. I do research for my classes and, on many occasions, my projects are based on them. It’s nice to see how they are intertwined. For example, when I took part in the Festival of Ideas with PHotoESPAÑA PRO Talento a bordo, I presented a project that suggested using PowerPoint as a creative tool. Something you use in class to convey ideas to students can turn into an artistic project if you change perspective. I’m genuinely interested in these kinds of intersections that occur naturally in everyday life.
“My work is referential, I don’t pursue originality,” you assured in another interview. Would you say that your talent resides in your ability to research, rethink and redefine images?
I don’t understand originality as something real. There’s a very interesting book by Rosalind Krauss where she talks about the myth of originality in the avant-garde. For example, I analysed the influence of African art on Picasso. That is, everything comes from somewhere and that’s beautiful too. Personally, rather than hiding those references, I find it more interesting to take responsibility, signpost them and work with them. You start with humility, train your ego and don’t pursue originality that, in the end, occurs anyhow; people understand that it’s your specific way of doing things. The attitude of “I have invented” or “I have discovered” is one I’m not interested in in art.
“While humanity exists, art, not only photography, will be immortal. The need to represent, replicate and preserve reality has always been a part of us”
Photography cannot escape overproduction, which has pushed you to define yourself sometimes as a “visual ecologist.” What do you mean?
The appearance of smartphones and social media was a paradigm shift, and photography is the perfect symbol of that shift. This is where the idea of visual ecology comes from, which means working with images that already exist and are in the public domain. My work could also be described as visual archaeology, recovering images that connect with the present and with a series of ideologies, like ecology or feminism.
Despite the current overabundance of images, do we lack visual culture? Is this something you perceive among your students too?
We are seeing how information overload causes misinformation because people don’t know how to navigate it. Something similar happens with images. My students have an incredible visual intuition—they are ahead in this sense—, but have less critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is vital, not just for art, but for life. It’s something that can get diluted gradually and it needs to be worked on in class. Their level of attention is also lower and that makes learning certain things more difficult, so the teacher’s job is to become a bridge, understanding that today’s channels are different. Nevertheless, I have a lot of confidence in young people. There is hope.
Motherhood has turned into one of the foundations of your recent work. Does the female gaze have increasingly more weight in your art?
Becoming a mother in 2017 had a vital impact that also touched my work. It’s a topic that I love because we still don’t have enough role models in this sense. Luckily, there are more and more artists taking charge of this topic. In a way, I think it comes naturally. In any case, that female gaze has always been there because both the critical approach to images and artistic practice are connected to feminism. Artists like Sherrie Levine, for example.
You say that photography has died and come back to life several times. Is it somehow immortal?
While humanity exists, art, not only photography, will be immortal. The need to represent, replicate and preserve reality has always been a part of us and we have developed different tools to do so throughout history. Photography is one of them. It is true that moving images are replacing photography. In any case, the speed that technology is moving at makes it difficult to predict what will happen.
Photography lost most of its material quality with the arrival of digital media. As a witness of this process, do you long for that more analogue past?
I don’t live in the past. I’m not really the yearning type, not in my life or in my artistic practice. Even though I work on historical themes, I don’t want to have a practice that is set in the past or that safeguards the past. I also don’t try to visualize the future because understanding the present already seems hard enough to me. Vernacular photography has lost its material nature: we hardly have any photo albums at home, we keep photos on our phones. Funnily enough, the opposite has happened in artistic practice. I feel comfortable in the sphere where photography becomes something material, something sculptural, for example. I also enjoy making collages because it’s a very manual process. I’m interested in that material quality.
