British photographer Julian Thomas moved to live in Spain in 2000. Having previously lived in Cambridge in the UK and worked as a sociology lecturer at the university there, it is perhaps not surprising that much of his work presents rather more than just a pretty surface. Much of it, he claims, is inspired by current global political events.

‘Whatever you have seen in recent days of demonstrations in Spain, prior to the Iraq war there were many more people coming together demonstrating on the street,’ he explains. ‘In Barcelona alone that were between one million and two million people every weekend. We’d all congregate in squares at ten o’clock to bang pans etc, if you were out walking or going somewhere, you’d rattle your keys. There was a huge sense of community.’

‘When Aznar eventually ignored all this it had a devastating effect as it
showed it didn’t matter what ‘the people’ thought, it was ignored,’ he continues. ‘This is one of the reasons why the recent reactions have been so strong, and at times, violent.’

Using the toy-like Holga camera to shoot images that struck him as he wandered around the city, obvious themes floated to the surface as soon as he started looking at the results. Playing with scale and perspective, nature echoes news images of bombardment and destruction to eerie effect. ‘I chose the Holga because it didn’t allow me to draw complex forms like I was doing in my other work, so that I had to forget the normal mechanics of composition. Looking at the images I realised I was doing something new for me, that my images were either pure expressions of power (even the flower/cactus picks were sinister) or meditative yearnings for peace (water images especially).’

And while Thomas is still unsure what exactly he’s going to do with the project, he says it’s fairly typical of his work as a whole. ‘I’m interested in showing an aspect of the world that is normally missed, isolating fragments, off-beat angles, showing beauty where I see it,’ he says.