‘The bear feels comfortable and uncomfortable. It’s a bittersweet moment’: Iñigo Jerez Quintana’s best phone picture

Capturing things that mix the strange with the beautiful helped the Spanish graphic designer recover from a blue period

Iñigo Jerez Quintana uses the French term objet trouvé to describe this abandoned bear. Quintana, a Spanish graphic designer, was walking from his studio to a work meeting in Poblenou, a district of Barcelona, when he spotted it.

“I take photos based on visual impulses; anything that catches my eye,” he says. “The colour match of the bear’s fur and wall paint anchors a childish stereotype in a place where it doesn’t really belong.”

Several years ago, Quintana went through a depressive period. “Without really understanding why, I started compulsively taking photos,” he says, adding that he found the act of paying attention to reality, of fixing his gaze on moments of discovery, therapeutic. “It allowed me to tolerate a reality that, without being reinterpreted through an aesthetic lens, was very hard for me to cope with. Capturing everything that mixed the strange with the beautiful helped me recover. The bear feels comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time. It’s a bittersweet moment.”

As a child, Quintana wasn’t a fan of stuffed toys. “But we did give my son a stuffed leopard when he was five, which he still has, over a decade later. In fact, we found it on the street.”