This hard land

Listening to Springsteen was like looking at hundreds of movies and photo books. Music has the ability to tickle imagination more than any for of art, it gives you images without imposing them, and a photographer has the greatest privilege to draw borders on that, to freely interpretate.

Springsteen songs have been a huge inspiration for me. Stories told in his songs are so full of visual details that one could even argue Springsteen is a photographer himself. 

The aim was to picture his songs and contemporary United States through them: the working class condition, the middle class crisis, the American Dream, broken but still alive, immigration and all the social and cultural fractures in Trump's America. 

Work is one of the most important topics in his songs: Springsteen's workers belong to underqualified tertiary industries of the suburbs and the sprawl of American cities. So these people try to climb the social ladder, and that's the American Dream, the hope that children will have better lives than their parents. This is the most painfully broken promise of the American Dream. 

The context of Springsteen stories are workplaces: car washes, car workshops, supermarkets, laundromats, diners, factories. And you can also have: homes, usually at nighttime, cars, , the sprawl, with its scale of grey that resembles a parking lot. And the night, as a salvation route, theatre of all escapes.

The Springsteen characters have no idea of where this Promised Land may be.

They are workers, fathers and sons, outlaws, veterans that after the war have found a new uniform: the working class army. And of course they are women.

I tell these stories and this topics forty years after the time Springsteen wrote his songs and this is made clear in the pictures.