MEMÓRIA

About Photography and Memory

My research makes use of a search for image deterioration in order to confront and question the reliability of photography as a representative of reality and guardian of history. It seems to me that just as our memory fades, losing its colors and changing over time, so too does photography lose its sharpness and reliability as we see the possibility of tampering and the change in the way of reading itself ( such as when we don’t know who a photographed relative is and the reference given to us by a grandfather or an older relative is lost, or when we get confused when we see someone who has died on television making comments about current things).

Regarding photography, there was, in a very short period of time, a revolution in the way of doing it, what was previously a physical-chemical, analog process was replaced by another electronic-virtual, binary language, where many of the procedures were modified, have disappeared or are changing with great speed. Thinking about photography nowadays causes us several dilemmas, which requires learning this new language and an adaptation of those who produced it in an analog way and migrated to digital photography production.

Regarding the association of the image with what is real. A photograph no longer represents a fragment of reality and many times it is no longer able to place us in relation to the time of its realization. What will be the space occupied by photography at a time when even the image of people or things that do not exist can be created without any difficulty, how can we distinguish what is true and what is not? The photos that follow were made using a scanner, with color negatives that I took a few years ago. I take advantage of the noise caused by time in the frames, added to some particularities of the digital capture, which highlights stains and modifies the colors originally portrayed, now corrupted by the appearance of fungi, adhesion marks to the negative holders and chemical deterioration.

There is also, as a result of further research, a new concern and, in this sense, which justifies the continuity of my search with what I will call “software memory” or “app memory” that poses the following dilemma: why are we putting in newly produced images these noises, these time loads – is it merely an aesthetic issue? Or in times of excessively clean and organized digital files, we need some humanization of these files. In addition, we are increasingly subject to computer programs to organize and categorize what we should and should not remember, or how it enters our timeline – on this timeline how reliable or how to understand these signals?

This work was distinguished with the XI Marc Ferrèz Prize for Photography in 2010.