Latest Post
Find info below!
The
Cherry Convoy
By Leo H. Alvarez
- Latest post -
PRECIOUS
trailer (2025)
Realising on Oct. 24th 2025
Out
soon!
Jan. 6th '25
(Here is the house)
``PRECIOUS´´ is my first personal big artistic project. I'm making a film using raw footage taken in the early 90's filmed by my aunt Ana when she was just a teen. She always had a cinematic eye, and growing up I always admired any artistic projects that she was involved in, even if they were small ones. I always thought that she had huge talent and it makes me upset that she never took it to the next level, and made anything out of this diamond mine that is all of this material that I made her send me. ``PRECIOUS´´is a closeup of my family's everyday life from 1993 to 1994. A time period that many of us from this generation are so inspired from. This piece shows the most genuine side of my mom's side family, an open-minded for the time, extremely art and music inclined middle class Spanish family based in Santander, my hometown.
My aunt Ana is the youngest of three siblings, my uncle Manuel, who I've mentioned before, my mom Elena and her. They were one of the first families in the neighborhood to get their hands on a video camera, and my aunt loved going around filming everyone and everything she could, which led to her unintentionally documenting an (in my opinion) beautiful perspective of their lives and story.
official posters
photography by
Elena Alvarez Diestro
ROMÁNICO
AUGUST 2025
Ft. Bernardo Aja
I was lucky enough to do a collaboration with my good friend Bernardo Aja, a well known photographer based in Santander who's supported me since the beginning of my artistic journey, and known me since birth. A long time family friend who I've grown up with, and someone that I've always looked up to.
In the early 90's, Bernardo went to photography school in the states where he met my mom, as they took a couple classes together. They quickly became good friends given that they both happened to be from the same small town in the north of Spain, and they shared the same love for music and fashion photography. Early in his career and during their 20's, he photographed my mom quite frequently, and she soon became his muse. At some point they moved in together, and even worked together in the same industry, to eventually make it back to Santander where they've continued their friendship until this day. Nowadays Bernardo holds a brilliant reputation in Spain and Mexico as a renowned photographer, as he's worked with important political figures as their personal photographer, such as Alberto and Keiko Fujimori, ex-president of Perú and his daughter, who also happen to be good family friends of ours.
For this project, ROMÁNICO Bernardo being the experimental photographer he is, was kind enough to trust me to help him make this series come true. He offered me to be the one to produce the event where this work would be shown, at the annual photography expo in the town of Comillas, produce the project itself, select, adjust clean up, and throughly edit these portraits taken by him. These images are meant to represent the historical and hereditary suffering of the old romanic women in the north of Spain in the 19th century. These women were often painted and portrayed in sad contexts.
for this project, we took inspiration from the unspoken sadness these women were shaped by, a sadness with a taste of war that many women in our generation are not free from yet.
Gut wrenching facial expressions, opera singing playing in the background, slow hand movements, tears, low lighting... mistreated women.
Bernardo and I worked together for the first time, and it was an extremely enriching experience. It's clear to me know that Bernardo, ''Berni'' as my mom calls him, is a true professional. Not that I didn't know so before, but as I've gotten closer to his art, I've started to really understand his valuable art values.
Nov. 19th '24
My uncle is in town! He surprised me with an express trip to Shanghai because he's working on a new movie. Him and his project partner, Mario, were completely clueless about needing a VPN here in China, they landed with a pocket full of useless cash and were completely uncommunicated until they arrived in Hong Kong, where they were able to message me and set up a meeting time and place for us the day after. We had dinner and spent the weekend together, and it felt sort of surreal. It's not rare that my uncle is in China, since most of his visual art projects require him to travel to Asia quite often, but ever since I was little I envied him for his passion and weird travels. So to be able to experience it with him for the first time was incredible. He took us through all of the weird little streets and neighborhoods of Shanghai that he was already weirdly familiar with. We had dinner at a famous soup dumpling restaurant in the city, we talked about film, and about his recent collaboration with Gaspar Noé, one of my favorite film makers. An asshole, apparently.
Camera: Nikon F3
Aug. 1st '24
These are pictures of my little dorm in Tilburg (The Netherlands), where I lived during my first year of uni studying jazz vocals.
I forgot I took these, I took them right when I started packing to leave for Spain before coming to China. To get to my bed you had to climb up a ladder and the radiator made weird noises at night. Still I think it's the cutest little room ever. The windows were huge and all my friends used to come over and sit on them to smoke. When more than 2 people wanted to spend the night, we had to inflate a shitty air mattress that would barely have any air left in it by the time we woke up, and my favorite thing to do was getting up in the morning and opening the two huge windows to let the breeze in. The smell of incense was always present inside. I loved cooking in my little kitchen, warming up pancakes in the toaster and hosting little parties. Student life can be so cute. I used to skip class all the time, so I spent many more hours in there than I should've, really.
My name is Leo, and I'm someone with infinity of passions trying to make it make sense. I have the urge to create something that I can look back on when I'm older, something that I can keep track of my artistic growth with. I love taking pictures, re-watching movies, descriptive writing, And I'd love to share my work with you.
I mainly focus on photography now, though I used to dig deeper into the music industry in the past, since I've tried pursuing a music career before.
This blog is a form of expression, I document little pieces of my life (sometimes journaling) and art projects hoping to keep track of my work, and learn little by little.
I'm NOT a professional in any field. I'm only a student, someone with ambition yet little idea of what to do with it.
If you like what you see, stick around!
Thank you!
Madrid Metro 2016 (Iphone 4)
You can subscribe!
Collaborations
