About me

Iker Zuñiga

India 2018

Born in 1996, I grew up in Donostia, one of the most beautiful cities in the world according to several magazines, and of course to anyone you ask in my home town. Marvelous places, great gastronomy, beach and mountain within half an hour drive, immersive warm culture, safe employment conditions… To the day, I don’t understand why I left.

I studied business administration three years there and one in Ireland, which was great to learn from a different pedagogical system. In Ireland, a friend let me her camera in the in between times to go out and take some pictures. After it, a close person who I assume knows nothing about this saw my joy and gave me a Canon 1300D, probably the most important gift someone can give; the freedom to enjoy a passion without the pressure of needing to make anything out of it. Since that day is rare to see me without my camera, which is now a different one.

Not too long after finishing my career and quitting my job in marketing, I moved to Madrid with a scholarship to study photography for two years. I also travelled in between. After the first year, and because the academy wasn’t offering me the practices I wanted to develop my photography, I found an opportunity to go to Peru for three months to help in the educational field with the promise of taking some pictures in my free time. I finally end up staying for more than one year living in a clerical house next to a church with one priest, two friars and Ana Rosa, who was nothing but fun, helping develop an upcoming educational institution which was a great success in a impossible more welcoming village called Socota, taking no more than what I consider two significant photographs and accomplishing an online master in innovation and entrepreneurship with a pretty high mark and a pretty low relevance.

On the way back home I just had one idea on mind, there is nothing more than photography. No part time job, no “you can do it on the weekends” if you truly want to pursue being a photographer. By the way, I didn’t complete my second year studying photography. I felt to be a photographer I was missing something the academy couldn’t teach me. It’s strange because it wasn’t until I could finally begin to call myself a photographer that I felt I couldn’t call most of my pictures photographs.

I photographed food, people in their professions, got hit by a rubber ball in the eye the last time I photographed any sport… but until I discovered in architecture photography the shapes under the shades and the endless odds within organized volumes, it wasn’t that I found out what I was lacking of. I was lucky to document some beautiful creations of local architects and worked hard to obtain a scholarship to photograph Studio Jencquel’s projects in Bali. Place in which I currently live or at least spend more time than in other places.

I now find fascination for photographing architecture and interior design projects to make them visible through magazines for people that perceive the added value of a great design. 

Photo by Stefanie Gasser