“Everything in my photo is real; I try to tell stories with fewer elements,” said Spanish photographer Garcia de Marina whose image of a globe protected by a gas mask – a comment on climate change – was turned into 162,000 stamps by Spain’s Postal Department.

“What denoted pollution earlier has now come to represent the pandemic,” said the artist who draws on surrealist influences to create ‘visual poetry’, while speaking at the sixth edition of Xposure International Photography Festival, which concludes Tuesday at Expo Centre Sharjah.

In a session titled, ‘The Other Side of Things’, Garcia de Marina treated the audience to a screening of his many cleverly photographed assemblages created using everyday inanimate objects such as an egg, clothes peg, chess pieces, and more.

Since 2011, the artist has been crafting dream-like imagined scenes with immaculate use of props. Objects have been his main means of expression, says the photographer, who is interested in their symbolism, or that random connection of elements – as in the image of a wooden cloth peg in the foreground with a dimmed view of the Eiffel Tower in the background. His work revolves around intuition and ideas, surrealism, and the world of the subconscious and dreams.

Garcia’s works are deeply irreverent of reality, seeking to transform and stamp objects with new identities as he challenges the obvious and pays attention to the greatness of everyday life. He seeks to imbue emotions even in a piece of cutlery or a match and can tell a story with just an eggshell.

A spider made using needles, an image ofJohn Lennon crafted out of spectacles, bullets under the bishop – a chess piece, all have a deeper meaning,as does the black thread wound around a spool and thick around the middle which seem to suggest gluttony.

During the session, the Spanish photographer confessed to the audience of his love for the UAE and shared the images he created as a tribute to the country. These include rice grains in the colours of the UAE flag, a painter’s palette with date palms to represent Sharjah, a gold bar in black signifying oil wealth, and coffee that spills out of a cup in the shape of the UAE map.