The work of 27-year-old Spanish architects and photographers Anna Devis and Daniel Rueda is frequently described as “cute,” “quirky,” and “adorable,” all adjectives that belie the serious following of the duo. Their Instagram accounts—@anniset with 178,000 followers and @drcuerda with 249,000 followers—though separate, are crafted to compliment the other, as two bookends might. To follow only one is to experience half of their creativity as exercised in a particular location; follow both, and their images figuratively form the full picture of their interaction with a destination.
Meeting in university, the duo embraced photography in order to speed up the process of sharing their ideas. “It started like a game,” Anna confesses to AdoramaTV. “We were going out, we were taking pictures, and little by little it became our work.” The chief tools of this work are a Canon EOS 5D Mark III, a Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L lens, a tripod, and lots of natural light.
Based in Valencia but with the locations of their photos dotting all over Europe, the two seem blessed with the ability to find the most vibrant–and likely overlooked–architectural elements and natural oases of a particular place. Take, for example, one of their most popular images: Devis stands in a simple black dress, holding up a simple black umbrella, against the white side of a building. She is smiling, but it is not raining. Instead a pattern of small, cube-shaped windows piercing the side of the building breaks around her, and we are invited to share in her whimsical exploitation of this hiccup in the matrix.
Their winning formula of depicting human interaction with bright colors and simple, geometric elements creates visually playful images. It’s the sort of cheerfully simple content that easily catches the eye, even during a quick scroll down your feed. Rueda describes his and Devis’ overall style as “creativity-driven minimalistic architectural self-portraits,” but confesses that all that minimalism is deceptive; in truth their images require huge amounts of behind-the-scenes work, least of all wardrobe planning and prop sourcing. “We think about a concept, then we draw, and we try to compose the picture in sketches. Then we do a little bit of scouting, looking for locations, colors, and strange facades,” says Devis.
One of their favorite treatments is manipulating perspective in the way that tourists pose with the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Rueda notes that one of his favorite movies is “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids,” and this influence exhibits itself every so often in his images, such as of a giant green apple rolling down a hill after him, or of Devis flying, in a superhero posture, out from between the pages of a book. The effect these give off is like the development of a fairytale, with Devis and Rueda as the chief characters.
On the commercial side, the duo has partnered with brands ranging from Nissan to Coca-Cola, and their most recent collaboration saw them jetting off to Buenos Aires with Iberia. For the most part, however, their work is purely for the pleasure of sharing “beauty in simplicity” with others and, hopefully, inspiring a little laughter.
