01/09/2025
Rest your eyes after a long day of scrolling on your phone with these photos by Xavi Buendia ( ), whose photo essays don’t just feature gorgeous images, but also reflections on the philosophy behind his craft.
In this excerpt, he writes about how, despite his love of black-and-white photography, he still has a deep craving for colour:
‘This emotional need for colour reminded me of what John Berger said about seeing and how the way we perceive colour is shaped by culture, memory, and experience. In that way, blue is never an absolute blue but a blue in relation to something else. This made me ask myself: Where does my way of treating colour come from? Why do I prefer the vibrancy of primary colours over any other tones? Why does colour harmony matter so much to me? And where does this deep need for colour come from?
‘The easy answer is obvious: I grew up between Mexico City and Barcelona, two incredibly colourful cultures and visually packed cities! But before picking up a camera, I was into all sorts of things like surrealist and expressionist painting, comic books, baseball cards, mid-century graphic design, 80s cartoons, Mexican muralism, and Catalan modernism. If you have the faintest idea about any of these subjects, you can picture something in your mind, and that, comrades, is how colour relates to past experiences; that’s a small element of what I try to evoke when I treat colour and that’s how you build your visual culture.’
Find out more via Xavi’s Substack 📸
All images by Xavi Buendia
