With Leila Amat I’m starting a new project. After a post I read in her blog –which I follow very often- I decided I should collect emerging photos and invite the creators to my blog.

Leila Amat is Spanish philologist and a Grammar and Literature teacher. However two years back she decided to dedícate her professional life to creative photography.

In the beginning of her career as an artista she didn’t start shooting with her camera, but studying them. She was 11 when her house in Seville burnt in flames, with all her infancy inside. Fire didn’t burn everything, but what was worth saving was smoked. Walls, things, everything was the color of a charred log. She then started cleaning one by one all pictures that her father kept in a box. That was her first experience with photoraphy, and stayed in her mind forever.

She didn’t do a shot until she was 17, with an analog camera. From then on out, she’s been progressing, evolving, improving her technique and aesthetic. Since the beginning she tries to make a universe of each photograph she makes, a paralell universe where she could interpret a character that she wasn’t in real life. She herself appears in most of the pictures. Leila concieves photography as a language to live, extend or analyse, a tool to dream and make everyone else dream.

She told me she never thought about exclusively dedicate her life to photography, but suddenly she realized that it was the only thing, together with love, that kept her alive.

She then decided to live out of her pictures, both economic and spiritually. She started selling her works in the streets. She spent hours every day showing and trying to sell her work of art. It was actually very hard because that way, the picture falls in value.

Currently she lives out of selling online in My web’art or through the Gallery Lumas (Germany) and Sophie Lanoe (French)

She came to our vintage space to bring me my wonderful acquisition “Emergent bamboo” and her only pressence left a halo of magnetism hard to explain. Leila transmits sensibility through her look and sweetness that make you love her almost from the first meeting.

I consider myself a lucky person for having her work decorating my house.

I’m sure you’ll love her work as much as I do. Go and visit it at:

www.flickr.com/manifestedesyeux and  www.facebook.com/leila.amat.ortega

Images: Leila Amat