“Love is in the Air” is a series of collages comprising two very different types of images: Barbie-pink, androgynous pictures mixed with very personal snapshots taking during an outing to City Island in the New York Bronx. Surprisingly, the contrasts Enrique Balulescu brings together meld with unexpected harmony.

Tell me about the fashion images here.
Basically, the idea was to shoot on a very simple background on the terrace of my friend Romina Herrera Malatesta’s apartment in the East Village. Romina and I made these images of the girls—one of whom looks somewhat more like a boy—knowing that they would be really quite simple, but that we were going to do something more with them later.

Where do the other pictures in the collage come from?
Those are quite old; they’re from 2009 or 2010. I was driving with my then girlfriend and my daughter, and we went to City Island in the Bronx. It was around this time of the year I think: the weather was like today; it was kind of cold. We stopped at a place to eat, at an old clam chowder bar. The place was really beautiful, and it was a beautiful evening. It was then I took those pictures.

Why did you make these collages?
I thought it would be really interesting to mix the two sets of pictures together. I added some pictures from my archive – because when I travel I always take pictures –, and I thought it would be really funny to put, for example, that fan on top of her head and things like that. I do a lot of collages. I have done collages all my life, since long before digital photography appeared, by cutting up contact sheets and things like that. But I made these ones on my computer. I think they’re quite funny. I think they look quite beautiful now; but I want to see if we can add some more pieces to make it all more like a puzzle.

You shot the fashion story on a Leica?
Whenever I can, I use Leicas, because they’re the most beautiful, most amazing cameras I’ve ever seen. The S 007 is super fast. They’re very quiet, and then, on top of that, if you need to synchronise a flash with the camera, you can do that so well. It’s an amazing camera, and S is an amazing magazine.

And what did you shoot the photos at the clam chowder bar with?
Believe it or not, those were taken with an old iPhone. So the Leica files are really very, very, very fine, and these are more grainy, and they’re mixed together. It’s a good combo: you use the Leica, which is like the ultimate camera, like driving a Bentley, or a Porsche, or a very fancy German car, next to an iPhone; which is funny, you know?

Do you shoot a lot when you’re going about your daily life?
I shoot basically all the time. I always carry my Leica with me. I travel to the Caribbean a lot because I have a house in Tulum; so I bought this underwater camera from Leica called the X-U, and if I want to drop in the water with it, that’s okay. It takes beautiful pictures even if it’s raining or, like yesterday, snowing. I’m pretty much always shooting pictures, even on the plane; I did an exhibition at Art Basel Miami in 2012 called “My Life Below, <My Life Above>”, and it was all pictures taken from airplanes. I’m always on airplanes, so I decided to do a story about my travels and how you see life through the windows of a plane.

Did you choose the pink background for the fashion shoot?
Yes, I always choose the backgrounds. There’s a funny kind of antagonism here: pink is perceived as a Barbie-like colour, no? Pink is a girly kind of thing actually; my daughter loves pink still, you know? And then that’s combined with this really androgynous feel. That’s one of the things I like about these pictures, that they’re like Barbie pink meets this androgynous, out-of-this-world kind of feeling.

Yes, I always associate you with a love of color.
I mean, I haven’t changed. It’s funny, my old agency told me so many times that I have to change, that everybody was tired of these very saturated colours; and I said yeah, but that’s the way I am. I’m a Mexican. My country is like that. I see like that. And then when you’re in Mexico and you see the light, or when you’re in beautiful places where the light is amazing; I think light is incredible, you know?