THE OTHER SIDE
Photography by JORGE PÉREZ HIGUERA
Original interview by Ana Belén for Stitch.
Have you ever think about how a Stormtrooper enjoys his free time? What do they do when they are not shooting a rifle or being easily erased by a Jedi? Do they have time to go shopping or washing the dishes? If you’ve never had these questions in your mind, you will have them now. Spanish photographer Jorge Pérez Higuera imagines the daily life of Stormtroopers as part of a society, just like all of us.
In his last year of college, Jorge found a second-hand stormtrooper armor and started this Star Wars themed project, back in 2012. He wanted to show us what would happen if these pop icons were just like most of us, middle class workers with daily routine tasks, starting a discussion about anonymity, stereotyping and the routines of the working class.
“The Other Side represents the routine of diverse individuals in order to manifest the importance of daily routine by de-contextualizing a fictional character and showing its adaptation to our world”. So let’s see what they are up to when they are not under the Emperor’s orders!
When did you start photographing and why? Have you always had this predilection for fictional characters of the popular culture?
I started being photographer when I was in my third year at Fine Arts. The second question is not easy to answer because I think I hadn’t but I have a lot of references of popular culture. Some of my stereotypes comes from popular culture so maybe pop culture is more important in my mind, in all our minds, actually, than I can imagine.
You are representing the mundane aspect of the daily routine of our society, but why did you choose stormtroopers for that?
I chose Stormtroopers for several reasons. First of all, the movies were made in the late 70’s, late 90’s and now they are coming back again, so they have the capacity to be liked by several generations. Moreover, the Stormtroopers have become a pop icon that we are all familiar with and that is why I think we can identify ourselves with them in some of my photographies. Lastly, I think the Stormtroopers represent the galactic working class (let’s be honest, if that future existed, we would probably be Imperial Soldiers and not heroes or villains), we don’t know anything about their identity because they are always wearing the uniform and we don’t even know their gender, although we tend to presuppose it. These are the main reasons I chose them. I like to think that in my photography I can represent everybody and nobody in particular and I love the idea that the distribution of roles is made by the spectators’ imagination in order to know if they are males, females, teenagers or elderly.
Read the complete article here.
