HERITAGES
2024
Cyanotypes - Family Album
When leafing through a family photo album that isn't your own, you scan the pages searching for a familiar face. Only the owner can identify them. Without any clues, they are strangers to us, outside of time, outside of any chronology. We could invent a story for them, since we don't know the real one.
Heritages is a series of cyanotypes that explores the intimacy of an inner narrative.
Who is it?
When was this? Where?
What remains today?
We turn the pages of an intimacy that is not our own, and we try to reconstruct a narrative with the few abstract fragments we have.
The more time one spends with the prints, the more one begins to sense — or attempts to sense — what is being revealed within them. The most curious gradually gain access to a reconstructed narrative, an image that unfolds with restraint, page after page.
I did not choose the most successful prints to make the book. Instead, I used the blurred ones, the imperfect ones, those that were overexposed or underexposed. I recomposed a whole with what I had, transforming what was considered “failed” so that it could ultimately evolve.
The cyanotypes, prints obtained after exposure to sunlight, are made from life-size X-rays of my parents and me. I don't know exactly why they had those X-rays taken. My father's X-rays show his structural bones, spine, and feet. My mother's showed her uterus. Mine show my shoulders, lungs, and ovaries.
