Baldomero Pestana
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Baldomero Pestana | |
|---|---|
 Baldomero Pestana in 2012 in front of his portrait painted by his friend, the Peruvian painter Herman Braun-Vega in 1978. | |
| Born | December 28, 1917 |
| Died | July 7, 2015 (aged 97) Bascuas, Province of Lugo, Galicia, Spain |
| Occupations | Photographer, painter, figurative artist |
| Known for | Photography, painting |
| Spouse | Velia Martínez |
Baldomero Pestana (Castroverde, December 28, 1917 – Bascuas, Province of Lugo in Galicia, July 7, 2015) was a Spanish photographer, painter, and figurative artist.
He emigrated in his childhood to Argentina[1] and began studying photography there as a teenager.[2] He married Velia Martínez in 1951 and remained with her until her death in 2003.
In the 1950s, he started working as a photographer in Buenos Aires, where one of his first photo sessions was with Dizzy Gillespie at the Teatro Casino. In 1957, he moved to Peru where he worked as an advertising photographer for the weekly Caretas and the cultural magazine Fanal.[3] There, he met numerous personalities of the great Latin American literary boom such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges, and Sebastián Salazar Bondy. During his years in Peru, he published for magazines like Esquire, Time, and Life. He also took photos of the Villa Miseria for the United Nations.[4]
In 1967, he moved to Europe and, after a brief stay in Madrid, finally settled in Paris where he continued photographing not only Latin American artists such as Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes,[5] but also artists like Man Ray, Roman Polanski,[6] and Fernando Arrabal.[7] By the mid-1970s, he began to abandon photography to focus on painting, working in a style close to hyperrealism.
In 2008, he returned to live in Galicia, where he had spent brief periods throughout his life. He dedicated himself to drawing and painting.[8]
