Schlecker by Rafa Castells displays a selection of pictures documenting the artist's day-to-day life. This first monograph also stands as an aesthetical essay on the symbolic effects of light and colour—offering a luminous discourse on photography and life.
Schlecker is Rafa Castells' first book and also Terranova's first published volume. For that reason, we cannot be objective about it. For us it's a gem. We love it as if it was our first-born son.
It all begun with a casual encounter at a Don The Tiger concert where Rafa and the editor started chatting about the possibility of doing something together and ended up with the idea almost developed in its entirety and a scheduled first meeting to talk about how to proceed.
Back then, Rafa had about a hundred undeveloped film rolls on a drawer in his room, because he shot at a rate way too high to process it all. And so it was decided on that first meeting that the contents of the book would come solely from the contents of that drawer.
It was quite an absurd agreement, random as everything else is in life. The rolls might not contain Rafa's best pictures, and these probably offered no coherence at all, but the book would act as a kind of review of some months in his life and also as a commitment to publicly show a set of images that had only been made to document his day-to-day.
Once the film rolls were developed, we had to select amongst almost 3000 photos and start a classification and edition process that took several months and underwent several changes of discourse.
Thanks to the contribution of Ana Domínguez, it was decided that the book should finally focus on a luminous discourse and thus portray light, from early morning to night's total black, accompanied by a progressive blending of pink and blue that symbolises the transit between day and night and which are also the colours of the 100 and 200 ISO film rolls sold at the German Schlecker chain stores. The very own films rolls that Rafa Castells used to document his life and gave the book its title.
Rafa Castells (born 1989, lives and works in Barcelona) is a
photographer and
video artist who collaborated with magazines such as
Vice,
Neon,
Pig, and
S Magazine, and with music bands such as Nitch, Univers, Corte Moderno and Beach Beach.