On Rubbing Spanish Leather: Guitarricadelafuente meets Alberto García-Alix

Text by Aitor Salinas

To mark the release of his second album, we invited Guitarricadelafuente to meet legendary photographer Alberto García-Alix in his Madrid studio for an intimate portrait session for DUST. García-Alix—a key figure in documenting La Movida and the raw edges of Spanish counterculture—has built a career spanning over five decades. The encounter, traced through the images, reveals a shared sensibility. There’s something unmistakably Spanish in both their work: raw, instinctive, shaped by place and time. One emerged from post-Franco nightlife, the other from bedroom recordings and village folklore in the early 2000s. Both capture something vital about Spain—not as a fixed identity, but as a tension between memory and reinvention.

Guitarricadelafuente—born Álvaro Lafuente—grew up between the coastal town of Benicàssim and the village of Las Cuevas de Cañart, where folk tradition and internet culture collided in real time. In 2018, he uploaded his first online song, El Conticinio, a haunting bedroom recording made with a PlayStation mic. Seven years, one album, and several singles later, the track landed in a 2025 Apple ad directed by Spike Jonze and starring Pedro Pascal. A strange, full-circle moment—but one that makes sense for an artist who’s always blurred the line between homemade and high-gloss.

In 2019, tracks like Guantanamera and Nana Triste (with Natalia Lacunza) caught fire online, setting the stage for La Cantera (2022), a debut that gave Spanish folk a new vocabulary—and a new audience. His music doesn’t romanticise the past, it repurposes it. With his second album Spanish Leather set for release in May 2025, he raises the stakes; musically, visually, and emotionally. On top of that, the cover was shot in Berlin by Wolfgang Tillmans, one of the most influential contemporary artists of our time—a subtle declaration of intent that signals the kind of cultural weight Guitarricadelafuente now carries.

SPANISH LEATHER

The new Guitarricadelafuente’s album not only solidifies the style that established him as one of the most compelling voices of his generation but it pushes it forward. Rooted in the raw textures of Spanish and Latin American folk, the album treats tradition not as sacred ground but as creative material: something to be reworked, stretched, broken open. Each track begins somewhere familiar—rhythms, instruments, melodies—and ends somewhere else. It’s a record of tension and shift, holding space for contradiction without needing to resolve it.

This time, the emotional stakes are higher. Spanish Leather digs into the space between sensuality and vulnerability—not as moods, but as forces in conflict. The genre’s romanticism is stripped back. What remains is lived experience: messy, physical, unresolved. He leans into ambivalence—the pull between intimacy and detachment—revealing insecurities, fear of betrayal, and a central search for identity that oscillates between the virtual and the real, appearance and validation, the past and the present. It’s not just a portrait of youth; it’s what it feels like to outgrow it.

This dynamic, explored by Guitarricadelafuente, is rooted in the constant tension between the old and the new, tradition and the future—whether in love, culture, or self-identity. His ability to look back at the past while boldly forging ahead, leaving the old path behind, mirrors the album’s core narrative: a coming-of-age journey of a young man leaving his village to discover himself in the outside world. This thread runs through the album, charting the move from youth to adulthood; the rush of self-discovery running alongside the fading depth of modern life, and the decision to stay with that complexity instead of turning away. What emerges is a relationship with the past marked by dialogue rather than reverence, by extracting what is essential to decode the present, marked by his passions and his desires.

Spain is everywhere, not as nostalgia, but as infrastructure. Tracks like Tramuntana, Port Pelegrí, Puerta del Sol and Babieca (a historic, now-closed club where his parents met) carry as much emotional weight as geographical meaning. From the smallest, most intimate corners to grand landmarks, each place takes on a mythical aura, grounding the album’s portrayal of Spain in its physical and emotional landscapes.

For Guitarricadelafuente, the longing to belong—to a land, a tradition, a shared identity that anchors us—stands in dynamic tension with an insatiable drive to break free. It’s about carrying one’s roots while embracing the chaos of the present, without forcing coherence but simply seeking to find a place within it. This perspective seamlessly intertwines personal and generational narratives, situating itself within a broader context where reimagining the essential elements of Spanish tradition—as a bold, unapologetic statement—is carried out with newfound confidence. It’s the sound of a generation stepping onto the international stage—fearless, self-assured, and confident in owning its heritage.

Much can be said about this second album, but it captures the clash between the poetic innocence of his beginnings and an emerging otherness that foreshadows adulthood, standing as a raw and direct exploration of his personal journey.

The title Spanish Leather encapsulates all of this, evoking images of leather boots crossing dusty horizons toward the outside world—skin hardened and thickened by the Spanish sun and environment–the toil that reflects Spain and its traditions, bulls as uneasy national symbols embodying both strength and defeat; and above all, of leather as something visceral yet sensual, resilient yet delicate.

While poetry and lyricism remain the driving forces of his songs, it’s this unfiltered confrontation with his inner self—whether rooted in heritage, deep emotions, or primal impulses—that transforms his journey from the village to the city, from the local to the world, into more than a narrative metaphor. It becomes the very path that brought this remarkable album to life. Through this collection of songs, we are urged to witness his evolving journey of self-discovery—a process that unveils a newfound skin, one that inevitably recalls the smell of Spanish Leather.

ALBERTO GARCÍA-ALIX’S EVER-CHANGING GAZE

Text by Aitor Salinas

All images by Alberto García-Alix

For fifty years, Alberto García-Alix has remained one of Spain’s most celebrated photographers, rising from the ashes of the country’s transition into democracy in the mid‑seventies to become the essential eye of its first countercultural movement—La Movida—and ultimately establishing himself as one of the most recognised and recognisable artists of his generation. Yet his celebrated vision has been built over time, in a story that is far from complete.

The story of Spanish photographer Alberto García-Alix (León, 1956) has, by now, already been told. Or, more accurately, already been written—assembled into what appears as a complete arc, filtered through a reductive lens, clinging to the romanticisation of a bygone era when his images first captivated the city that brought them to life. The city of Madrid between 1980 and 1986 and the countercultural movement that blazed through its streets—La Movida, Spain’s radical cultural explosion after the Franco dictatorship—is etched into the country’s collective imagination through the perspective of García-Alix. For many, both names are inextricably linked: one cannot be fully understood without the other. And while that may be true, the exercise inevitably leaves both definitions incomplete, especially his. At its height, La Movida barely lasted half a decade. Its punk icons and their impact were crystallised in Spanish cultural history as symbols of the country’s first brief, unfiltered encounter with freedom in over forty years. But García-Alix has been photographing for over fifty years—a lifetime behind the lens, often confined to a moment in time, he has always managed to transcend.

In the official press release issued by Spain’s Ministry of Culture when it awarded him the Medalla de Oro al Mérito en las Bellas Artes—a recognition granted “to individuals and entities who have distinguished themselves in an eminent manner in the field of artistic and cultural creation”—García-Alix’s work was described, somewhat reductively, as “black and white portraits of characters with a marginal air and rock aesthetics.” A definition that, evidently, the photographer took issue with.

“A ‘marginal air’? ‘Rock aesthetic’? What is that? Is that my work?” he asked Zara Fernández Moya in an interview on the photography podcast Ojo de Pez. “That little gift came poisoned. When I woke up and saw the newspaper, I felt terrible. And, coming from the Ministry, that says very little about Spain.”

But that’s not an isolated case. Any account of García-Alix’s life tends to orbit a familiar set of symbols that conjure a very particular side of his story. He was the first person in Madrid to own a Harley-Davidson. For a time, he dated Ana Curra, the keyboardist of the generation-defining band Alaska y los Pegamoides. He ran a bar called La Mala Fama (“The Bad Fame”) on Calle del Barco—a dense, dangerous strip at the epicentre of La Movida’s nightlife. He watched many of his friends die from addiction, as did countless others in 1980s Spain. And he was notoriously an addict himself.

This last detail surfaces often, despite García-Alix having said, “It’s so far gone now that I feel like it happened to someone else.” He has the scars to prove it—or rather, had them, and then had them removed. In 1979, García-Alix was a rocker styled after London’s Teddy Boys. “I got a Teddy Boy tattoo that said: ‘Don’t follow me, I am lost’, next to a rose. Back then, I was an addict. For me, that tattoo always embodied heroin. And when I decided I had to quit, I knew that tattoo was weighing me down—that I could never quit heroin with that tattoo,” he told Marta de la Calzada in a 2025 interview for Telva. “But one day I got up in the morning, went to a tattoo studio and told the guy: ‘Cross out the “Don’t follow me, I’m lost”, because I’m not lost.’”

So allow us, at last, to set the record straight.

A RACY INTRODUCTION TO PHOTOGRAPHY

Alberto’s brother was a motorcyclist, and Alberto shared that passion—he still does. As these lines are written, he’s driving his trusted Triumph from Menorca to Madrid. The fascination began at nineteen, when he started accompanying his brother to local races. It was there that he saw one of his friends, Germán del Caso, taking pictures. Every Wednesday, del Caso would come to the García-Alix home with the photographs of the weekend’s race and, that Christmas, Alberto asked his parents for a camera—it became a passport of sorts, triggering a few leaps of faith. The first was into the world of photography, of which he had no formal knowledge. The second one was into the world at large, which, to a degree, became an extension of the former. By his own words, “photography cannot be separated from (his) life,” and so his truly began with that first camera’s click opposite a motorcycle drifting on a dusty road.

He took a few pictures in the year following that Christmas 1975, but shortly afterwards, he moved into the small flat of his friend Fernando Pais in Madrid’s Rastro district. He used his kitchen as a laboratory, and it was there, during an acid trip gone bad, that García‑Alix realised his cherished independence had curdled into emptiness—an emptiness that pushed him towards drugs. The dark‑room routine became his escape: more negatives demanded more photographs. And, almost accidentally, he ended up capturing an era.

ORGANISING REALITY

Although it was born out of a necessity, the fact that the camera helped García-Alix structure his life—regardless of how precarious that arrangement with himself was—built a very personal, very intimate relationship with the images he took. He has said that the camera was his tool for composing reality, and in a chaotic world of drugs, freedom and teenage turmoil—he was only twenty at the time—his drive to find meaning is palpable in those early images.

García-Alix has described his initial methodology as that of a hunter, although there is none of the malice of a killer in the pictures. Almost always bathed in a pure, white light, it is true that the photographer had a voracious appetite to use his device as the pen to his diary of personal chaos, capturing with childlike curiosity whatever crossed his path: a lonely chair in a deserted Madrid bar that moments before had been occupied by his friend Ceesepe, David Bowie’s Pin Ups poster hanging from a dishevelled window pane, the first workers’ rally after the Civil War, the earliest demonstrations for queer rights in Spain, or acquaintances shooting heroin. But his innocence and search for meaning acted like a great equaliser, giving every subject a quiet, composed elegance. Through his camera, he bestowed upon them an order they lacked in real life, which is why the chaos does not permeate the images and why they hold such a delicate force: he was a witness to his surroundings, not a chronicler, and there’s a piece of him in every picture. It was not long before people started falling in love with the way he imbued beauty into such a complicated world.

A CAREER AS A PHOTOGRAPHER

If his life as a photographer started in 1975, his career as one did not actually begin until the 18th of December of 1981, when the Buades Gallery in Madrid inaugurated his first exhibition. He sold his pictures there for five thousand pesetas, which would approximately be equivalent to 30 euros—roughly a professional endeavour, yet certainly the beginning of one. He was twenty-five and, at that point, a very popular figure amongst the capital’s youth who attracted a colourful array of people into the world of art. When his rocker friends began pulling up to the elegant gallery on their bikes, he started to become a city‑wide sensation, with local newspapers covering the show and his prints selling briskly.

He staged a second exhibition in the Moriarty Gallery in Madrid in 1982. He directed a couple of short films for La Edad de Oro, a cult TV show that aired on Spain’s public broadcaster from 1983 to 1985, widely regarded as an influential audiovisual record of La Movida. And, in 1984, London came calling practically by chance. He sent a friend one of his pictures as a gift, and when she went to the Portfolio Gallery to get it framed, they enquired about the author and were very surprised to hear the picture had been taken in Madrid. A few months later, he sent a second one, and when she went to Portfolio to have it framed as well, they asked to meet him. García‑Alix flew to London with his photographs and, together with Portfolio, put up a sell‑out show—yet the momentum swiftly evaporated.

London’s Photographers Gallery commissioned him a second portfolio for a new exhibition that he failed to deliver after signing the contract—twice. Drugs had taken over and, in a very short period of time, he lost his house, his girlfriend and his brother Willy, who in 1984 died of an overdose. After ten years of independence, he moved back in with his parents. A turning point came during a trip to Venice. After his friends left, he decided to stay on—broke and alone—sleeping rough on the city’s streets for days until he asked the police to repatriate him to Madrid. That experience made him decide to change. He would have also lost himself had it not been for Valle Quintana, a gallerist he met in 1986 who saw that he was far from done. 

AN ENDING AND A BEGINNING

Symbolically, the year 1986 also marks the end of La Movida as a movement, the breaking point being a state-sponsored trip that took many of its popular figures—including politicians, journalists and artists whose names still resonate in Spain, like Alaska, Ouka Leele, Los Nikis, Gabinete Caligari, Ana Curra and Fabio McNamara—from Madrid to Vigo, a city in the north of Spain that had a similar movement to the one in the capital. It was set out to be an ornate cultural festival, a meeting of the minds, but when out of the overnight train with an open bar came a group of visibly inebriated people, Spain cringed and simply moved on. The fact that artist Fabio McNamara threw a bottle at a girl’s head and she had to be taken to a hospital was just the final nail in the coffin.

Alberto García-Alix was also on that train. Seemingly, he was the only one for whom the trip represented a new beginning and not an ugly end, an apt metaphor for an artist who transcended the movement from the start: His career really took off when La Movida simply went stale and faded away.

Valle Quintana, who back then was directing the very influential La Cúpula Gallery in Madrid, approached García-Alix during the trip. She asked how he was doing. “Like shit”, he answered. “I’ve lost everything”. But she wasn’t impressed. “You’re doing like shit because you want to do like shit. You give me an exhibit and I’ll sell it”. And this time, the photographer delivered. She gave him a month and a half to do the photos, paid the production, and instead of giving him money, she gave him the material to shoot so that he would not spend it on drugs. He organised a makeshift laboratory in his parents’ bathroom and created an exhibition that introduced him, after eleven years, right into the mainstream.

A GUN FOR HIRE

Crowds flocked to the exhibition at La Cúpula. Everyone who went loved it, and many actually bought the now appropriately priced pictures, particularly a few influential figures in the city that immediately fell in love with his work and opened the door to a realm he had not had access to before: photographing commissions. And García-Alix’s world suddenly widened in the commercial sense: “It was the first time I earned a wage honestly.”

He made enough money off the exhibition to take an apartment in the Pacifico district in Madrid and buy a light kit that he still has to this day and a second-hand Hasselblad camera. He started photographing album covers, doing portraits for magazines like Sur Exprés and El Europeo, as well as for newspapers like ABC and El País, two of Spain’s biggest and most respectable household names in the news printing business. And in between those commissions, he made an unlikely foray into the world of fashion.

Just like photographer Javier Vallhonrat, who had just started working with designer Sybilla Sorondo in creating some era-defining catalogues, García-Alix is a legend in a field he actually never found particularly interesting. “The whole fashion racket makes the clothes heavy on the image, and it ends up losing the sincerity of the character”, he admitted in an interview in the Spanish edition of Icon. “I find it distracting.” But regardless of his distaste, both defined an era of Spanish fashion for diametrically opposite reasons: if Vallhonrat created ethereal images of otherworldly magic and colour, García-Alix kept his straightforward naturalistic approach for designers like Devota & Lomba and Manuel Piña, who discovered his work in that exhibition at La Cúpula.

Piña was the one who offered him his first fashion work, and the result is possibly one of the most famous images in Spanish fashion: model Cristina Barrera, surrounded by a group of curious onlookers in front of Las Ventas, Madrid’s bullfighting ring. “I came up with the brilliant or stupid idea of going there in the middle of the San Isidro popular festivities to take pictures of her”, he explains to us. “The brilliance of this photo is in the camera angle: a low shot that positions both the model and the public behind her”. That effect turned the image into an icon, which became somewhat customary for García-Alix, a first in his career: “I saw those images going from magazines to the wall of people’s homes with a thumbtack.”

There were portraits of Alaska, Emma Suárez, Camarón or Elena Mar, whose image was used in a poster that was everywhere in the city back in 1988. And then there was Inés Sastre. She would later become one of Spain’s most famous models and the successor of Isabella Rossellini as the face of Lancôme’s Trèsor in 1996, but when García-Alix photographed her in 1987, she was a fourteen-year-old girl who had just been part of Carlos Saura’s latest movie.

“She came with her mother to the studio dressed in her school uniform. They wanted to change her clothes, but I decided it was more interesting to photograph her as she had come”, he tells us. “I never plan what I’m going to do—I let it flow. I took Inés into my courtyard and had her hold my assistant’s hand while she looked at someone just outside the frame.” That image, too, became part of many people’s homes.

A NEW GAZE

Commissions represented a substantial part of his work and his livelihood, allowing him to navigate his thirties as a financially stable freelancer, socially recognised photographer and evolving artist: “I was fortunate to be free in that work. First free to accept the jobs I liked, and then free in actually doing it how I wanted to do it.” But success had not wiped away the past, and García-Alix was still dealing with an addiction he could occasionally fend off but not totally do without. It was always there, as life kept going on.

Around this time in the late eighties, he joined Los Centuriones, Spain’s first motorcycle club. He lived with them and photographed the experience for a few years—the road, he says, was never the same after that. In 1994, he took his obsession a step further by founding his own racing team. Nearly a decade of high-octane travel followed until 2003, when he found himself in Paris. There, he was diagnosed with hepatitis C and forced to quit drugs and alcohol and undergo a gruelling interferon treatment—a decision he accepted after an unexpected ayahuasca session gave him the peace he needed to begin.

The secondary effects of the treatment were devastating. It gave him chemical depression, fever, pains and a generalised weakness that forced him to his bed for weeks. But it was there, as he was lying down, looking at the Parisian roofs through the skylight in his room, that he started looking within. “It was a nightmare”, he told journalist Roberto Villalón in 2024. “But the pain and depression gave me a much more abstract look. Much more introspective. The dialogue with what I look at changed. I realised that what I look at has to come back to me to be able to see myself in it. In Paris, I broaden the subjectivity of my gaze. After that, there is a break with my previous work.”

That new path took shape in his first video work, Mi alma de cazador en juego, which would give way to two more pieces, Extranjero de mí mismo in 2005 and Tres moscas negras in 2006. The three works would later be combined in the trilogy Tres vídeos tristes, which in 2008 became his first standalone exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain’s most important contemporary art museum.

Structured in a sequence of images over the narration of García-Alix, who wrote his own introspective texts, the three videos weave together the story of a man coming to terms with himself and evolving as an artist in real time, using the camera that once was used to give order as a way to give meaning—new meaning. To his work and, as an extension, to his own life.

THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

García-Alix still takes pictures today. He sees photography now as “a space in which to invent (himself)”, which means he basically has to invent himself every day. He still takes commissions, and he photographs out of personal joy. He does so on analogue cameras despite it becoming an increasingly complicated endeavour. Not only because he has to order film in bulk—stores rarely have it available anymore—but because something as simple as going to the airport becomes a bother when the X-rays at security checks are so strong they fog the film rolls. He has to call a Guardia Civil officer to come check them and make sure they don’t have to go through the machine. But, to him, emotions come across as fake when photographing digitally, so he is happy to comply.

He tells us that the nostalgia other people feel about his early work doesn’t personally affect him: “In fact, it spurs me on to do other things. I understand this reaction because there are photos that have become icons of a time, which is funny, because when I took them, they went unnoticed. It has been time and my career that have given them that position.” So he balances looking backwards—he is currently editing the third tome in a collection of books called Archivo Nómada, where he is revisiting every single image he has ever taken—while looking forward: organising exhibitions—eight in 2024 and two in 2025 so far—and participating in projects like 2018’s Doce Fotógrafos en el Museo del Prado, where he was able to spend ten nights in Spain’s biggest and most important museum rediscovering through his lens centuries-old paintings.

After fifty years, his work has reached a sense of completion that still does not feel final, achieving a width that encompasses everything he has ever done at once. We asked him if he thought he would be able to live without photographing. “Of course I could”, he answered. “But, for the moment, the innate curiosity of what I could find leads me to keep picking up the camera.” It’s the same curiosity that once made him ask for one on Christmas, the same that led him to use it as a tool to first create order and then meaning. And it ended up creating a world for him. A world that he keeps expanding every day.