Daniel Rueda and Anna Devis. Creative stories.

The young Spanish duo, Daniel Rueda and Anna Devis, use creative photography to tell stories, each one embedded in a light, playful snapshot. Daniel talked to us about the sustainable lightness of visual storytelling.


A girl whose yellow hat is transformed into an egg yolk, a boy trapped by the lines on a road in Superkilen, Copenhagen, are just two of the innumerable photos crafted by Daniel Rueda and Anna Devis, both of whom have thousands of followers on Instagram. The feeds of Daniel, a professional architect and self-taught photographer, and Anna, an architect as well and a communications expert don't just give followers great photos, they tell stories that tickle the fancy of the observer.
But don't be fooled by the light-hearted, wacky nature of their shots. Every single photo is the end result of a creative process that is developed from the concept to the sketch through to preparatory drawings so they can gauge the feasibility of their idea, but more importantly to make sure the images really are comprehensible. Sometimes it is the place that inspires a photo - like Copenhagen, the location of the bicycle photograph - at others, it is an object that triggers their light bulb moment. Whatever the case, there is almost always a person and this human element is as fundamental as the composition of the whole picture and it is by no coincidence that they involve visual references to René Magritte, the great maestro of surrealism as much as to history. 
Each photo fed onto social media is accompanied by a short caption, and the words are the meta-code for the image; but the photo itself, being a significant surface, is the true bearer of the message. Despite their introductory words, the creators let observers freely use their imagination to create their own story, along the lines of Magritte, because what is said is not what you see... and what you see is not what was said. So, Daniel Rueda and Anna Devis don't reproduce the real world - or what we perceive as the real world - in their photography project. Rather, they give us a kind of two-dimensional representation lying somewhere between painting and photography.
The thing that stands out the most in the photos crafted by this young duo is the sheer sense of fun that they get across. Something intimately connected to Daniel Rueda's childhood. His father loved photography and always took photos of the fun, enjoyable moments of family life, like holidays, birthdays and the like, so Rueda has always associated the act of bringing out the camera with something positive. And that's the feeling you get when you lose yourself in the visual storytelling of this Spanish duo.

@chrisbuerklein

Anna Devis aka @anniset 
Daniel Rueda aka @drcuerda 
https://www.facebook.com/drcuerda
https://www.facebook.com/fotografodearquitectura
http://danielrueda.net/