Clemente BERNARD

He worked as an assistant for the photographer Koldo Chamorro from 1986 to 1992.

He has developed a professional career as a photographer since 1986, in which he is characterised by a fundamental interest in social and political issues within his immediate cultural environment, where he is confronted with his own personal prejudices. Thus, although he has worked extensively as a photojournalist for various media, he has devoted the last 30 years to photographing the vast majority of Spain's major crises and political issues, through long-term photographic essays: he has photographed the crisis of the Spanish countryside showing the life of its day labourers, the life in refugee camps of the thousands of Saharawis since 1975, the long and bloody conflict in the Basque Country, the drama of the migrants who die crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in fragile small boats, the cruel Islamist attacks in Madrid on 11 March 2004, and the project Donde habita el recuerdo, an essay on the work of locating, identifying and exhuming mass graves in the context of the Spanish Civil War of 1936.

In his work, Bernad proposes a gaze that is situated, aware of its identity and location, non-neutral, contextualised and open, and which openly renounces any position of privilege, always posing grey areas far removed from any certainty.

His visual treatment of space usually raises questions related to the role of personal identity, challenging the increasingly insistent demand for identification and social control.

Bernad accepts photography's own inability to meet all our political expectations, but this does not prevent him from working with the documentary image precisely to create spaces of instability that allow him to give a visual opinion on the society in which he lives.

Always concerned with the use and context in which his images are exhibited, Bernad prefers to adopt for each of his works the photographic voice that best suits them, sacrificing a supposed personal style for the ideal way of resolving each subject. Serving the subject rather than serving the subject. In addition, he advocates that in the books in which his photographs are published, they should be constituted as an autonomous visual discourse that discusses with other discourses in order to delve deeper into the subject in question, without the texts referring to his images.

He is currently working on the current socio-political situation and develops his activity as an independent professional, in a broad sense of the term.

Clemente Bernad is the author of more than a dozen books, his work has been published in the main media and is present in numerous collections of public and private institutions, as well as in national and international museums.

He worked as an assistant for the photographer Koldo Chamorro from 1986 to 1992.

He has developed a professional career as a photographer since 1986, in which he is characterised by a fundamental interest in social and political issues within his immediate cultural environment, where he is confronted with his own personal prejudices. Thus, although he has worked extensively as a photojournalist for various media, he has devoted the last 30 years to photographing the vast majority of Spain's major crises and political issues, through long-term photographic essays: he has photographed the crisis of the Spanish countryside showing the life of its day labourers, the life in refugee camps of the thousands of Saharawis since 1975, the long and bloody conflict in the Basque Country, the drama of the migrants who die crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in fragile small boats, the cruel Islamist attacks in Madrid on 11 March 2004, and the project Donde habita el recuerdo, an essay on the work of locating, identifying and exhuming mass graves in the context of the Spanish Civil War of 1936.

In his work, Bernad proposes a gaze that is situated, aware of its identity and location, non-neutral, contextualised and open, and which openly renounces any position of privilege, always posing grey areas far removed from any certainty.

His visual treatment of space usually raises questions related to the role of personal identity, challenging the increasingly insistent demand for identification and social control.

Bernad accepts photography's own inability to meet all our political expectations, but this does not prevent him from working with the documentary image precisely to create spaces of instability that allow him to give a visual opinion on the society in which he lives.

Always concerned with the use and context in which his images are exhibited, Bernad prefers to adopt for each of his works the photographic voice that best suits them, sacrificing a supposed personal style for the ideal way of resolving each subject. Serving the subject rather than serving the subject. In addition, he advocates that in the books in which his photographs are published, they should be constituted as an autonomous visual discourse that discusses with other discourses in order to delve deeper into the subject in question, without the texts referring to his images.

He is currently working on the current socio-political situation and develops his activity as an independent professional, in a broad sense of the term.

Clemente Bernad is the author of more than a dozen books, his work has been published in the main media and is present in numerous collections of public and private institutions, as well as in national and international museums.