/NEWS/

Interview by EIC Irina Rusinovich Kevin Pineda starts where most photographers stop: at the delete button.

The blurred shot, the misfire, the frame that never made the cut because it was too soft, too strange, or too honest — these are the images he works with. In *Fragmentia: Oculations of Reality*, he takes those rejected photographs and physically tears, folds, and manipulates them by hand, then mounts them in brushed stainless steel frames that throw your own reflection back at you while you look.

The exhibition ran at SPRUCE Gallery in Manila from May 22 to June 13, 2026, curated by Ric Gindap. The central idea, as Gindap puts it, is simple and a little unsettling: the rejected image might know something the polished one was trained to hide.

Pineda is not a photographer who only photographs. He studied architecture in London, apprenticed at a gallery in Rome that showed Tracey Emin and Anselm Kiefer, ran his own art space near the Colosseum for five years, built furniture in Tallinn, and shot fashion across Milan, Paris, New York, and Manila. All of that ends up in the work whether he intends it or not.

We sent him five questions. Here is what he said.

Miguel Maldonado has lived out of a suitcase long enough to know that style has nothing to do with where you are. Monterrey, Barcelona, Berlin, New York, four cities, two decades, one consistent eye. What changes, he says, is the conversation he has with each place, what never does is the way he sees.

Now based in New York and running Mi/Ma79, the creative platform he founded with his husband in 2025, Miguel approaches fashion the way a writer approaches language  as a system of meaning, not decoration. His editorial for PHM 012, „I Can Buy Myself Flowers,“ is exactly that: volume and color and theatricality in service of something larger than a look; a woman who does not wait, a femininity that needs no permission.

We asked him about geography, discipline, and the moment he realised that styling was never really about clothes.