Born in Bilbao in 1971, Aitor Ortiz uses photography to create artworks that explore space as it relates to architecture. Using analogue and digital techniques, Ortiz takes spaces devoid of any specific reference to time or place and projects them into his photographic constructions, activated by a variety of architectural elements. At this point, an interplay of dialogues and relations begins to unfold between the inherent components of the image—form, composition, light—that transcends the frame to include external elements like volume or the space around the spectator to ultimately become architecture. His work is organised into series, a method allowing him to explore different registers of the same idea. The series ‘Destructuras’, which includes the piece Destructuras 069, consists of black and white photographs of buildings included in the register of international, contemporary architecture. Having said that, the series actually focuses on a structural element: it reduces the building down to its skeleton, the geometric graticule upon which it rests. In these portraits of abstracted and deserted structures, tension arises between the monumentality of the buildings and their confrontation with the horizon they’re set against. The series ‘Modular’ increases the level of abstraction and dynamism. The lens moves right up to the concrete to capture its textures, the rivets in the formwork, the folds in the wall, the imposing materiality. The dynamism derives from the modular nature of the 28 photographs in the series, which can be arranged into different combinations to produce angles and juxtapositions: the photograph leaps off the wall to yield new dimensions and relationships. Other series followed, including ‘Millau’, a study of the viaduct in Millau, southern France, contemplating the contrast between the engineering project and the natural environment; ‘Muros de Luz’, capturing how light filters into the black marble quarry in Marquina, inviting the spectator to enter mental spaces carved into stone; ‘Espacio Latente’, where the volume of the architectural forms becomes both form and subject to explore the three-dimensionality of the image. This reaches full expression in ‘Amorfosis’, a series where the photograph goes beyond its traditional dimensions to expand into the space, literally constructing itself.