SUPERSTARS. A visual essay on aesthetics, popular culture, and role models

Taking as its central axis the snapshots that Andy Warhol made in the mid-20th century, and extrapolating that work to 21st-century Spanish society, the author has devoted nearly a decade to portraying with a Polaroid role models, idols, myths, and icons who have symbolized dissent, authenticity, and who have definitely changed his life.

Superstars. A visual essay on aesthetics, popular culture, and role models is the result of a pop anthropology work that analyzes the power of aesthetics as a tool for self-construction and vindicates the figure of the role model as a fundamental cultural phenomenon, alongside the most well-known and recognizable faces of our country.

The book opens with an extensive conversation, in interview format, held with Mario Vaquerizo in June 2019. A text that addresses topics such as aesthetics, the importance of role models in the construction of identity, the difference between high and low culture, fame, celebrities, and popular culture.

It is followed by more than 150 Polaroid portraits, captured between December 2017 and December 2024 in cities such as Pamplona, Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Santander, Zaragoza, Valencia, Benidorm, Paris, London, and Ibiza. These snapshots make up the visual section of the project and give body to a work that documents, celebrates, and preserves the faces of an era from the author’s perspective.

About thirty interviews, with a common basis, seek to analyze reality from different viewpoints, to get to know the people behind the most well-known faces on the national scene. Singers, performers, vedettes, artists, celebrities, socialites, activists, transvestites, or designers reflect on topics such as plastic surgery, political correctness, superficiality, naturalness, or the future.

The journey culminates in an epilogue. A collection of texts that complete and give meaning to the overall work. In them, the author shares his creative process and reveals the secrets of this adventure. Additionally, he answers questions and develops concepts that had been intentionally left open, with the sole purpose of not conditioning the reader and allowing them to live the entire experience without limits.

About the author:

Kenai Alkazar (Pamplona, 1998) is the result of a conscious and active cultural self-fabrication that he has been building for more than a decade. A compulsive liar by nature, expert in pop imagery, and a declared disciple of Warhol, he defines himself as a homoerotic photographer, kitsch collector, and drag artist. He is the author of Superstars. A visual essay on aesthetics, popular culture, and role models, a work marked by an idea that has always accompanied him: «one is more authentic the more one resembles what one has dreamed of oneself».