Reunited with Pere Colom
Lucy Hawkins catches up with the renowned Mallorcan photographer
15 years ago I was sent on an assignment to Palma by a magazine in order to interview Pere Colom, one of Spain’s best photographers. Slightly apprehensively if I remember, I walked up the stairs of the edgy old apartment building off Avenidas to his studio and found a tall, trendily dressed eccentric man with a mass of grey curly hair and a winning smile.
By Lucy Hawkins
26/3/25
At the time Pere was busy working for English, German and Spanish magazines such as Vogue and Elle. Pere was a real charmer and lots of fun, his work covered the walls and, having run out of space, piled up on the floor. I asked him what made him tick and he instantly replied, ‘women’ with only the hint of a smile detectable under his bushy moustache. He showed me his beautiful collection of portraits that were featured in El Pais magazine and after I had finished the interview, Pere took my portrait and it was published alongside the piece.
15 years later, having returned to Mallorca, I contacted Pere to see if I could interview him again, and perhaps he could take another portrait.
This time I’m not travelling to Avenidas, or even Palma, but to Sóller where Pere is from. His studio is now in the house where he grew up and home to him, his former opera singer wife and their dogs. A beautiful stone building on the edge of town, it’s surrounded by orange and lemon trees and sculptures given to them by their fellow artist friends. He’s still eccentric with a winning smile, his curly hair is whiter but his spirit is unchanged. It’s wonderful to see him again, he’s as warm and welcoming as ever with a way about him that enables you to pick up just where you left off.
His studio is still piled high with his work and he wastes no time in setting up the lighting and taking my photo as we catch up.
Lucy: Pere, how have you been?
Pere: " Good, still alive! But my expiration date draws nearer. It was my 70thbirthday party recently. I had a big party in a club in Sóller. The members of the rock and roll band I played in flew in and we did a gig for all my friends."
Although Pere is known for his photography, music was his first love. In the early 80’s, he became a bass guitarist in a band called The Sex Beatles who took inspiration from their idols, The Sex Pistols and The Beatles, and toured England several times. Pere also played with the likes of Kevin Ayers, Lemmy from Motorhead, Andy Summers from The Police and The Pretenders.
Lucy: Fantastic! Sóller seems to be an artistic hub. I was delighted to find two wonderful art exhibitions at Sóller train station when I arrived: the Sala Picasso and Sala Miró. Apparently Miró’s maternal grandmother hailed from Sóller and that Picasso visited him here. Did it feel creatively inspiring here growing up?
Pere: “Not at all!. When I was a teenager I played music because I loved music and you could play for tourists so we organised a band doing summer hits. Playing for Swedish chicks was what inspired me.”
He laughs and I remember that getting a serious answer out of Pere can be challenging.
Pere: “It was fantastic as a young guy here in 1974, something very special. Because of that I got into rock and roll.”
Lucy: You never had a teacher?
Pere: " No! I never had a teacher for photography or music. Where would I get a teacher in Sóller?! Nobody in Sóller played electric guitars, not the kind of music I liked, Hendrix, they played bolero or something romantic. Palma was different. But back then and at age 14 Palma seemed very far away."
But it was Pere’s fascination with photography that finally won over music and he invested all his savings in a Nikon F2 single lens. He took 36 shots of his then girlfriend on a Mallorcan beach and showed a friend who was about to have a meeting with the Art Director of acclaimed French photography magazine, Photo. The magazine rang later that day to say they loved the pictures and had decided to publish his work on nine pages and the cover of their next edition.
Pere: " Based on that I thought maybe I could be a photographer. The idea also appealed to me because back then the only places to base yourself in the music industry were London or New York and with me being a bloody Mallorcan, I wanted to stay here."
Pere has worked as a photographer in fashion, advertising, and interior design ever since. In 1990, he was selected by Kodak, along with 11 other photographers, to exhibit his work for six months at the Epcot Center in Florida, USA, in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of photography.
He started showcasing his artwork in galleries and museums as well as working on ongoing commercial commissions. In 2012 Pere moved back to Sóller to work on his personal projects.
Lucy: How is it being back in Sóller?
Pere: " It is beautiful, we are very lucky. You would have to be billionaires to buy a house like this here now. My grandfather lived up in the mountains, we had several houses, everyone did, one where you grew fruit, another with chickens…but people get sick, you have bills, families have to sell a house or part of their house, then there is nowhere for all of the siblings. The cafes are all full and no one is from Mallorca. But tourism is good for business, this is life."
Lucy: It seems to have got a lot busier than when I was here in 2010. In our last interview you said that in Mallorca you relax and life is more important than what you do for a living, that, happiness for me is to do my work when I want to and when I need to.
Pere: " That doesn’t change. I don’t have a manager, I don’t sell myself and that’s an island attitude. We wait for people to come here, we always have, we didn’t send boats out. (Laughs.)"
Lucy: You have made a book ‘Deià Vu Portraits’ an incredible collection of portraits of the vibrant characters who live in Deià that you describe as a real mix of cultural coexistence since the arrival of Robert Graves in 1929. Can you tell me about it?
Pere: "Yes. In 2019 I was in the gallery at La Residencia (A Belmond Hotel in Deià) where I had spent so much time and I found that I missed many people, people that had left Deià or died and I said, ‘Jesus! I have to collect the people that are still here.’ So I started creating a book to capture the people and the landscape that is changing. COVID interfered and it was a long process. Sadly 5 people from the book have since died. But I included young people too, because that special thing about Deià lives on."
Lucy: It’s wonderful. What else have you been working on?
Pere: " The second project is ‘Neo Classics’. It’s a review of classic works of art. But with retouching I have changed the models and added current elements like tattoos, dreadlocks, computers, mobiles. It’s allowed me to somehow pay tribute to both the past and present and ponder on the evolution of humanity."
Lucy: Have you come to any conclusions?
Pere: " What I try to show is the techniques and the people change but the human hasn’t changed."
Lucy: Writing for a living is changing with AI, has the advent of smartphones affected professional photography?
Pere: " I’m still working with special clients. But I’m not going looking for clients, especially as now everyone can do photographs with iPhones, they don’t need special photography. The prices that clients want to pay now is not the same, sometimes I can’t do the cheap work. I take time on each picture, every detail, it’s not just an iPhone picture with filters. I spend hours, days on the detail."
"The Uffizi piece (Pere retouched ‘The Tribuna of the Uffizi’ to include people he knew, current celebrities, modern day props) took days but this is pixel by pixel work with photoshop. The difficult thing is the original painting has a texture so to get the same from a picture (superimposed photograph) is very difficult. I have to do it manually because every original picture is different. Velazquez is not the same as Rembrandt. Putting smart phones in the picture, a Mallorcan journalist who is always talking about the jet set, a photographer for Ultima Hora and his camera, I put a gallerist in, introduced aeroplanes into the sky on the paintings. I put myself into the picture, my dogs… (more laughing)."
Lucy: How can people see the piece?
Pere: " I might tell some galleries. Maybe no one will see it, but it doesn’t matter, because I enjoyed doing it."
Lucy: Tell me about your project, ‘Olive Trees and Myths, A visual investigation on the origin of the myths of Greek mythology’.
Pere: "When I was young I always saw figures in the trunks of olive trees, faces, animals. So this is a continuation of that. My hypothesis is that during the veneration of the white goddess, that is, at night under the lights and shadows projected by the moon, with only a minimal capacity for observation, each and every one of mythological figures appears embedded in the shadows of the ancient olive trees."
Lucy: Were you inspired by Robert Graves’ book, ‘The White Goddess’ ? (In his book, Graves describes the White Goddess as a figure representing the ancient and powerful feminine divine associated with nature, fertility, and the moon).
Pere: " Well actually the thing is my idea is that the phoenix or the minotaur… I can imagine a pagan Greek taking marijuana or some drink and seeing the monsters in the trees. So I used Robert Graves’ White Goddess because it’s the moon illuminating the trees, the shadows, you can see all these figures. I took all the pictures in the one hour before the sun goes down."
Lucy Hawkins catches up with the renowned Mallorcan photographer
15 years ago I was sent on an assignment to Palma by a magazine in order to interview Pere Colom, one of Spain’s best photographers. Slightly apprehensively if I remember, I walked up the stairs of the edgy old apartment building off Avenidas to his studio and found a tall, trendily dressed eccentric man with a mass of grey curly hair and a winning smile.
Lucy: You have made a book ‘Deià Vu Portraits’ an incredible collection of portraits of the vibrant characters who live in Deià that you describe as a real mix of cultural coexistence since the arrival of Robert Graves in 1929. Can you tell me about it?
Pere: "Yes. In 2019 I was in the gallery at La Residencia (A Belmond Hotel in Deià) where I had spent so much time and I found that I missed many people, people that had left Deià or died and I said, ‘Jesus! I have to collect the people that are still here.’ So I started creating a book to capture the people and the landscape that is changing. COVID interfered and it was a long process. Sadly 5 people from the book have since died. But I included young people too, because that special thing about Deià lives on."
Lucy: It’s wonderful. What else have you been working on?
Pere: " The second project is ‘Neo Classics’. It’s a review of classic works of art. But with retouching I have changed the models and added current elements like tattoos, dreadlocks, computers, mobiles. It’s allowed me to somehow pay tribute to both the past and present and ponder on the evolution of humanity."
Lucy: Have you come to any conclusions?
Pere: " What I try to show is the techniques and the people change but the human hasn’t changed."
Lucy: Writing for a living is changing with AI, has the advent of smartphones affected professional photography?
Pere: " I’m still working with special clients. But I’m not going looking for clients, especially as now everyone can do photographs with iPhones, they don’t need special photography. The prices that clients want to pay now is not the same, sometimes I can’t do the cheap work. I take time on each picture, every detail, it’s not just an iPhone picture with filters. I spend hours, days on the detail."
"The Uffizi piece (Pere retouched ‘The Tribuna of the Uffizi’ to include people he knew, current celebrities, modern day props) took days but this is pixel by pixel work with photoshop. The difficult thing is the original painting has a texture so to get the same from a picture (superimposed photograph) is very difficult. I have to do it manually because every original picture is different. Velazquez is not the same as Rembrandt. Putting smart phones in the picture, a Mallorcan journalist who is always talking about the jet set, a photographer for Ultima Hora and his camera, I put a gallerist in, introduced aeroplanes into the sky on the paintings. I put myself into the picture, my dogs… (more laughing)."
Lucy: How can people see the piece?
Pere: " I might tell some galleries. Maybe no one will see it, but it doesn’t matter, because I enjoyed doing it."
Lucy: Tell me about your project, ‘Olive Trees and Myths, A visual investigation on the origin of the myths of Greek mythology’.
Pere: "When I was young I always saw figures in the trunks of olive trees, faces, animals. So this is a continuation of that. My hypothesis is that during the veneration of the white goddess, that is, at night under the lights and shadows projected by the moon, with only a minimal capacity for observation, each and every one of mythological figures appears embedded in the shadows of the ancient olive trees."
Lucy: Were you inspired by Robert Graves’ book, ‘The White Goddess’ ? (In his book, Graves describes the White Goddess as a figure representing the ancient and powerful feminine divine associated with nature, fertility, and the moon).
Pere: " Well actually the thing is my idea is that the phoenix or the minotaur… I can imagine a pagan Greek taking marijuana or some drink and seeing the monsters in the trees. So I used Robert Graves’ White Goddess because it’s the moon illuminating the trees, the shadows, you can see all these figures. I took all the pictures in the one hour before the sun goes down."
Lucy: When I asked you what made you tick 15 years ago you said, women. What makes you tick now?
Pere: " My last book, Goddesses of Body and Soul. It’s an homage to women. To regular women, not models. They were aged between 24 – 60 year old. They’re nude but they’re not posing erotically. They’re saying, “here I am, whether you like it or not I don’t care.” Power to the women. I went up to all of the women on the street to ask them to be in the book, regular women. Only 3 said no, everyone else said yes."
" I used the same light as the Deià project, the same background, everyone is in the same attitude. As soon as you take the clothes off there is no reference. People hide behind their clothes. What was fantastic was that none of the women were nervous, they all said that they never thought they would feel that comfortable without their clothes in front of a camera. When they saw the book project they got emotional. I took a group photo of some women, they were friends, they felt so comfortable they wanted to go nude to the bar afterwards to celebrate."
Lucy: What’s next?
Pere: "I don’t know, I’m doing whatever happens, tomorrow maybe my idea of life is going to be completely different, maybe I’ll call you and say delete everything I told you today. Many things and nothing special. Two or 3 more books, one on the olive trees."
The photoshoot is finished and we go to lunch in Pere’s tiny car that he loves because it’s so old it doesn’t beep when he takes his seatbelt off. We head for the beautiful village of Fornalutx because Pere says it’s less busy than Sóller and we find a spot in front of a small restaurant looking out at the valley, but as Pere goes to park someone takes his spot. Pere swears profusely in English.
Lucy: Your English is warming up now!
Pere laughs and miraculously the car allows us to park. Pere orders baby pig for us both and calls the waitress, ‘Reina’, queen.
Lucy: I’ve noticed that my children’s teachers call my daughters ‘reina’, it’s lovely.
Pere: " Yes, and women call their men, rey, king."
Lucy: Have you seen The Leopard, the recent Netflix series based on the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa?
Pere: " No."
Lucy: Well it’s about Garibaldi arriving in Sicily and the unification of Italy. And the Leopard, the Prince of Sicily, he doesn’t want change but he’s very calm in the face of it, he says the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, they all came to Sicily and we just shrugged, dusted ourselves off and waited for the next lot. He reminds me of you, you’re unfazed.
Pere: " Yes. We’ve seen many people come and go in Mallorca. I say, so what, they’re going to buy a house and renovate it - it needs renovating. You used to have 1 bathroom outside, now you’ve got 4 inside. You can’t use them, but the houses aren’t going anywhere, they’re staying in Mallorca, they can’t take them."
Pere shows me the YouTube video of him playing his gig with his old band, The Sex Beatles, at his recent 70th birthday party and despite him not being driven by a need for acclaim, I see a passion for music and photography that’s undiminished by time. I look forward to seeing what he’s producing over the next 15 years.
For more on Pere Colom please visit:
Lucy: When I asked you what made you tick 15 years ago you said, women. What makes you tick now?
Pere: " My last book, Goddesses of Body and Soul. It’s an homage to women. To regular women, not models. They were aged between 24 – 60 year old. They’re nude but they’re not posing erotically. They’re saying, “here I am, whether you like it or not I don’t care.” Power to the women. I went up to all of the women on the street to ask them to be in the book, regular women. Only 3 said no, everyone else said yes."
" I used the same light as the Deià project, the same background, everyone is in the same attitude. As soon as you take the clothes off there is no reference. People hide behind their clothes. What was fantastic was that none of the women were nervous, they all said that they never thought they would feel that comfortable without their clothes in front of a camera. When they saw the book project they got emotional. I took a group photo of some women, they were friends, they felt so comfortable they wanted to go nude to the bar afterwards to celebrate."
Lucy: What’s next?
Pere: "I don’t know, I’m doing whatever happens, tomorrow maybe my idea of life is going to be completely different, maybe I’ll call you and say delete everything I told you today. Many things and nothing special. Two or 3 more books, one on the olive trees."
The photoshoot is finished and we go to lunch in Pere’s tiny car that he loves because it’s so old it doesn’t beep when he takes his seatbelt off. We head for the beautiful village of Fornalutx because Pere says it’s less busy than Sóller and we find a spot in front of a small restaurant looking out at the valley, but as Pere goes to park someone takes his spot. Pere swears profusely in English.
Lucy: Your English is warming up now!
Pere laughs and miraculously the car allows us to park. Pere orders baby pig for us both and calls the waitress, ‘Reina’, queen.
Lucy: I’ve noticed that my children’s teachers call my daughters ‘reina’, it’s lovely.
Pere: " Yes, and women call their men, rey, king."
Lucy: Have you seen The Leopard, the recent Netflix series based on the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa?
Pere: " No."
Lucy: Well it’s about Garibaldi arriving in Sicily and the unification of Italy. And the Leopard, the Prince of Sicily, he doesn’t want change but he’s very calm in the face of it, he says the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, they all came to Sicily and we just shrugged, dusted ourselves off and waited for the next lot. He reminds me of you, you’re unfazed.
Pere: " Yes. We’ve seen many people come and go in Mallorca. I say, so what, they’re going to buy a house and renovate it - it needs renovating. You used to have 1 bathroom outside, now you’ve got 4 inside. You can’t use them, but the houses aren’t going anywhere, they’re staying in Mallorca, they can’t take them."
Pere shows me the YouTube video of him playing his gig with his old band, The Sex Beatles, at his recent 70th birthday party and despite him not being driven by a need for acclaim, I see a passion for music and photography that’s undiminished by time. I look forward to seeing what he’s producing over the next 15 years.
For more on Pere Colom please visit: