Gorka Postigo: architecture of emotion in fashion and portrait photography

Trained as an architect before fashion and portrait photography, Spanish artist Gorka Postigo blends structural precision with emotional nuance—his work spanning high fashion campaigns and intimate reflections on the layered nature of human experience. He possesses the rare ability to be fully immersed in both realms, moving fluidly between them bringing elements of each to the other. Gorka Postigo has shot high-fashion editorials and campaigns for leading brands including Miu Miu, Jean Paul Gaultier, Carolina Herrera, Paco Rabanne, and the 2025 reimagining of Dolce & Gabbana’s iconic Light Blue campaign starring The James and Vittoria Ceretti. His work has appeared in major publications such as AnOther, Icon Magazine, Vogue Italia, and Vogue Spain. His series Presente Futuro, shown at La Fresh Gallery in Madrid, offered a tender portrait of Spain’s transgender youth, while his latest project, the deeply personal You’ll Never Meet My New Friends—launched at Paris Photo 2025—maps grief, community, and renewal through a series of portraits taken internationally in the aftermath of Postigo’s own loss. In this conversation, Postigo speaks with hube about community, craft and the experiences, both beautiful and hard, which unite us all.

h: Paris is a city full of history and stories of creatives finding their voice, but it’s not exactly a cheerful place. How has living there shaped your creative ambitions and direction?

Gorka Postigo: Paris, I feel that nowadays it feels like a dream to be living and working here. I have the feeling that in the arts and in photography, it has become the epicentre of the world, or at least a very important spot where you have, every two weeks, major art events where people from all around the world and the best craftsmen and women are based. So right now, to do my practice in Paris means being surrounded by the best people. It really feels very challenging and inspiring at the same time—amazing. I mean, it has the fame of being tough, but I think the character of the city has evolved. It has become way more international. It’s always been, but even more, I feel that it has become a very cosmopolitan city, and you have people coming from all over the world all the time, and it feels very, very, very vibrant and very inspiring.

h:  How has your background in architecture influenced your approach to composition? Would you say your process is more technical or more instinctive, shaped in the moment?

GP: Architecture has definitely shaped the way I compose, the way I see things, the way I frame things with my camera. There is definitely something that’s still there. Studying architecture was extremely influential and is still present in my practice, even though I don’t do architectural photography directly. It is there not only in the composition of the scene, but also in how I conceptualise a project or an image. I think that can be seen in the still lifes I shot for this last project, for the book You’ll Never Meet My New Friends. I think it becomes more architectural. There’s clearly a very carefully staged composition where I try to balance elements, which can be understood or read as something more architectural. Architecture gives you these skills of understanding, of transmuting an idea, of transmitting a concept, and that is very valuable. I feel very lucky to have had the chance to study architecture.

h: You’ve described You’ll Never Meet My Friends as a tribute rather than an explanation. Why was that distinction important to you? What guided your decisions about what to reveal, and how did you manage any expectations from others about your story?

GP: There are many things that led me to choose this title for this project. Many on the personal side, on the personal field, on my personal experience going through grief and loss. But I also found a connection with the grief that queer people carry in their experience in their lives. There is a lot of letting go. There are many queer folks that have to go through grief because many times you have to leave behind your family. You have to leave behind your place of birth; you have to leave behind old friendships or all things that don’t really work on your soul, so ‘you’ll never meet my new friends’ means this idea of letting go and of evolution, of assuming that there are things you have to leave behind. Once you close one door, there’s another one that opens. So somehow it’s a cycle. It’s a cycle of life. It’s a cycle of endings, but also of beginnings. I took the phrase ‘you’ll never meet my new friends’ from a song from Sade in the nineties called Maureen. She sings to a friend of hers that passed away. What I like about this song is that it’s a very happy song. It’s very sad lyrics, but it’s a very happy song. I liked this contrast of saying goodbye but also embracing new people. And the fact that you can put that in a book or in a project of photography gives me the illusion to introduce these new friends, these people, to people who are no longer here. So somehow photography can make this connection, at least the illusion. Grieving is something painful, but there’s something also beautiful somehow in honouring the people who still shape us even though they’re no longer here. We carry them and it’s beautiful to honour them, and it’s beautiful to keep on talking to them and keep on introducing them to new people and to think that they would be proud of the things we’re doing. It’s beautiful to keep counting on them and having an open conversation about the people who are no longer here. We carry them.

h: Grief can be incredibly isolating, and queer grief even more so—an invisible void that grows harder to see over time. Yet it’s one of the most universal experiences outside of birth. What has sharing this through your work taught you? Have you learned anything new about yourself or others through exhibiting it?

GP: There is something very magical in photographing people—that are total strangers, but that you share some connections with, whether it’s because you belong to the same community or because you share similar experiences. As queer people, I think even if we’re total strangers, we know how we felt when we were growing up, how society was telling us that somehow you didn’t fit in, that there was something wrong, that there was a certain pointing finger on your back, or without even you realising what is the difference and why. And sharing this and having total strangers in front of you who choose to open up and share their experience and their lives with you—the idea of creating community is something very, very powerful. I feel very, very grateful for all the people that opened up and decided to share their story, to inspire others and to send the message that they’re not alone.

I was very surprised because it was a very personal project, and when you decide to put a book together—and to put a personal work together—nobody asks you to do it. It’s only the personal need. Does the world need to see any of this or hear any of this? But it feels like yes, people really connected with it. That made me feel very honoured and flattered and overwhelmed because I didn’t understand that, at the end of the day, grief is a very universal language. We’ve all lost something and we’ll all lose something at some point. And there’s something—you can’t do anything about it but accept it and turn it into something beautiful, maybe a beautiful memory, a beautiful act of love, a beautiful photo, a beautiful gathering. Something that honours all the love that you’ve shared, that you keep on sharing, even though the people are no longer there.

This is something that I really carry and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned that despite the differences of culture or of geographic location where we’ve lived, no matter if I shoot someone in Tokyo or in Rio de Janeiro or in Paris or in my hometown, we share the same things. We share the same hopes. At the end of the day, we want to be loved and to be accepted. That’s just a very simple and powerful thing. By sending this message and this echo of saying, ‘Hey, you’re not alone’, there’s something very strong.

There is a need to build community beyond social media. Social media has brought an idea of ‘false community’. We’re hyperconnected, but most of the time, through social media, we isolate instead of connecting; we compare. We give a false image. We have false expectations through a very distorted image. I’ve used social media a lot for connecting with queer people. That really helped me a lot. But the encounter and the one-to-one, and bringing down all the masks and showing your wounds and your vulnerability—I think it is something very important and powerful and that we need to maintain, to value, and never forget the power of it.

h: Photos are, in a way, a practice of attachment—an attempt to hold onto fleeting moments that together make up a life. In grief, the loss of physical attachment takes many forms, until we find a new kind of connection within ourselves. In your work and life, what does this attachment look like, and how do you reconcile with it?

GP: I’m surrounded by things that remind me of the ones that are no longer here. It is a curious balance because there has to be a balance between letting go and keeping things that remind you that there was someone that loved you or inspired you or shaped you. I don’t really know what would be the perfect combination and formula for this balance, but I guess it’s when it’s not heavy in your heart—what you carry—all the opposite. When it illuminates and inspires you, I think you have to keep it. When it drags you down, I think it’s time to let go. It really depends on the personal process of your grief, but I think it’s good to still carry things. I’m surrounded by things that remind me of a lot of people.

h: American author Joan Didion wrote, “Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.” Has this felt true for you, and how has photography—this ability to extend time—shaped your experience of memory?

GP: The first book when everything happened was The Year of Magical Thinking. She’s an author that I carry with me, and the way she speaks about memories and the fact that somebody’s there until one day and the other one is not there, it’s something you really don’t recover from. I think our brains are not trained. We are attached to those memories and those people. In my case, it was three losses of very close people in a very short period of time, so that really changes everything. You just say goodbye to a world and a life you knew and you start another one. It cannot be the same without those people. You have to be prepared to accept that the world is going to change and it’s going to change eventually because the world changes fast. And I still want to tell them all the time. I really think of what they would think of this and that and this new technology or this new way that we’re communicating. It is a conversation that is not finished. It’s never finished. You want to have it. You can’t just keep going—but in a different world, a different life.

h: In this project [launched during Paris Photo week] you hold your subjects with care and respect for the intimacy and trust they offer. Do you see vulnerability as a form of strength, and if so, why do we so often fear it?

GP: Absolutely, the moment you let down your mask and your shield and you show your wounds and you show your flaws and you show your fears, you become kind of invincible because you don’t have anything to lose. When you’re transparent to others and you don’t hold anything, it’s something that is unquestionable. On the contrary, when you’re trying to hide something, you’re all the time fearing that they’re going to find out. And we are much more transparent than we think.

It is very powerful and it’s very freeing when you just show everything. It’s a beautiful way to connect because, again, we all go through very similar experiences sooner or later. So there’s always going to be someone that is going to identify with what you’re going through. It helps; it is what makes us human and what makes us connect and somehow understand each other.

I think this fear of vulnerability is a social construct—a lot of the time it has a lot to do with an image and a type of masculinity—that men shouldn’t show their feelings. They should be strong, they should be cold, they should be winners, and any sort of vulnerability would be read as a failure or form of weakness. I think it’s quite the contrary. I don’t think there’s anything more generous than to show your vulnerability when a friend comes to you and opens up. It’s a major proof of love in a friendship, and it is something valuable that somebody trusts in you. And when you do this with a wider audience, I think people appreciate that. It’s not that you have to show your vulnerability all the time, but sometimes we go through things in our lives that we don’t choose and we cannot choose. And you cannot stay all the time pretending that everything’s good when it’s not—and when it’s not, it’s okay.

h: Your work emphasizes hope—the idea that the void left by grief can be a space for growth, with the camera acting as a bridge. What does hope look like for you today?

GP: Hope for me looks like people caring for other people, building community, seeing people caring for others—being empathic, being generous, being caring with the people who need help. We might eventually need help at some point; we all will. Giving that help first, I think, is going to guarantee somehow that we will get that help when we need it, and we will all need it at some point. So I think that people understanding that we need to be there for others gives me hope. Seeing people that do things for others gives me hope.