Artist Spotlight: I.S Mancha

Photographer I.S. Mancha speaks through metaphoric introspective images whose tone is as moving as CCR playing over sixties helicopter footage or a hushed held hand “I love you” echoing through the Musée d’Orsay as they pass effortlessly over the lips of your lover. His lens captures ideological American optimism through nostalgic romantic eyes; each image a constant juxtaposition between the sense of the object captured itself and a wave of acute overwhelming representations of the alive and reminiscent sense of meaning being stirred within the viewer. Subjects become objects and those objects are reflections of ourselves not in the flesh of decay and loss but in the spirit of timeless ever-present awe of being. Carl Jung once wrote, “who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes,” the photographs of I.S. Mancha do both.

Although never limiting himself to a single format, Mancha prefers using Kodak Portra 400 when shooting in color and Ilford HP5 for black and white saying, “over the years I’ve collected and shot on a few different cameras, both medium and small format but I always gravitate back to the first film camera I purchased; a Minolta X-700. It’s been with me for the last ten years and it’s still the love of my life.”

Originally from Austin,TX Mancha currently lives in Prague studying cinematography with plans of moving to Berlin.