COLOMBIA

Gelatin Silver Print, 30 x 30 cms., 2009-2015

This Project develops around the name of “Colombia” as a place, which is presented outside “Colombia” as a place.

For this Project images of different places called “Colombia” had been taken in places that are not “Colombia”. Streets with this name in other cities from other countries. This is an ongoing Project and continues to grow as a collection of post cards that I obsessively look for whenever I have the opportunity of traveling outside of Colombia.

The way of putting together these images has been somehow similar to the work of the French photograph Eugene Atget who took pictures all over Paris at the beginning of last century at dawn so there would be no living being, thus creating a surreal and phantom world of the capital city of France. In a similar way as he did, I also take pictures of the streets very early in the morning so the attention of the observer is centered only in the place, the space and the atmosphere given by the dawn light. Atget worked with a camera of those times with glass plates and albumin which helped to create a surreal and phantom like optic. In this project I work with a Holga camera of medium format, which is a plastic camera almost like a toy which produces images closer to the strange images from a camera obscure than to the “classic” and “perfect” obtained by a conventional camera.

On the other hand, reference is made to the work of the Japanese artist and photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto who does a minimal work in general, but specifically in his work “Seas” where he takes photos of all sorts of seas around the world with the horizon line always in the same place with the idea that this has been one of the primary images that the human being has seen since his origins till the present time, very similar and yet very different ones. As he does, I try to keep always the same horizon line and the same fugue and perspective in order to obtain a minimalist work in its structure as it they were places which might belong to any place but still bound together by the same title.