SUPERSTARS. A visual essay on aesthetics, pop culture, and role models
Focusing on the snapshots Andy Warhol took in the mid-20th century and extrapolating that work to 21st-century Spanish society, the author has spent nearly a decade capturing with a Polaroid the role models, idols, myths, and icons who have symbolized dissent, authenticity, and who have definitely changed his life.
Superstars. A visual essay on aesthetics, pop culture, and role models is the result of a pop anthropology project that analyzes the power of aesthetics as a tool for self-construction and champions the figure of the role model as a fundamental cultural phenomenon, featuring the most well-known and recognizable faces in our country.
The book opens with an extensive conversation, in interview format, conducted with Mario Vaquerizo in June 2019. A text that addresses topics such as aesthetics, the importance of role models in identity construction, the difference between high and low culture, fame, celebrities, and popular culture.
It is followed by more than 150 Polaroid portraits, captured between December 2017 and December 2024 in cities such as Pamplona, Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Santander, Zaragoza, Valencia, Benidorm, Paris, London, and Ibiza. These snapshots form the visual section of the project and give shape to a work that documents, celebrates, and preserves the faces of an era through the author’s perspective.
About thirty interviews, based on a common framework, seek to analyze reality from different angles, to get to know the people behind the most familiar faces on the national scene. Singers, performers, vedettes, artists, celebrities, socialites, activists, transvestites, and designers reflect on topics such as plastic surgery, political correctness, superficiality, naturalness, and the future.
The journey culminates in an epilogue. A collection of texts that complete and give meaning to the overall work. In them, the author shares his creative process and reveals the secrets of this adventure. Additionally, he answers questions and develops concepts that had been intentionally left open, with the sole purpose of not conditioning the reader and allowing them to fully experience the work without limits.
About the author:
Kenai Alkazar (Pamplona, 1998) is the result of a conscious and active cultural self-fabrication that he has been building for over a decade. A compulsive liar by nature, an expert in pop imagery, and a declared disciple of Warhol, he defines himself as a homoerotic photographer, kitsch collector, and drag artist. He is the author of Superstars. A visual essay on aesthetics, pop culture, and role models, a work shaped by an idea that has always accompanied him: “one is more authentic the more one resembles what one has dreamed of oneself.”
