Jesús Umbría Brito
Spain
Jesús Umbría Brito is a photographer whose gaze not only observes but also engages in dialogue with the world and the passage of time. Closely tied to urban cultural life, he inhabits the spaces he documents, fostering active complicity with his subjects. His work explores identity, gender, and diversity, focusing on marginalized realities. Exhibited internationally and finalist in awards such as Gomma Grant and Head On Festival, he was recently invited to the Chico Review 2025 in Montana, USA.
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Retaguardia
Retaguardia belongs to the underground tradition of photography that emerges from the encounter between the photographer and communities living on the margins. Echoing the work of Bruce Davidson or Mary Ellen Mark, it questions how identities are forged at the edge of the norm.
The series portrays post-pandemic youth immersed in the counterculture surrounding punk music and aesthetics — a mosaic of faces searching in the mirror of the past to shape their present. It is both a personal journey, revisiting spaces once lived by the photographer, and a contemporary exploration of new generations rewriting history.
Through portraiture, the work examines identity as a constellation of signs and gestures, belonging as a vital drive, and social boundaries as contested terrain. The gaze — of author, subject, and viewer — becomes a narrative bridge, a contact zone connecting generations, dissolving boundaries between past and present, presence and memory.
