My grandfather was an amateur photographer who used a wooden view camera to take photos. When I was about 8, I became his ”assistant”, which only meant to hold a leg of his tripod. I recall those moments in which I was the subject photographed, then showing me a piece of paper still soaked with fixer and he would tell me: ”This is you.” That statement which seemed more than obvious at the time, began to gain significance as the years passed. My grandfather is gone and I am unable to clearly remember what I experienced in the past. So now to remember who I am, I need to look at that picture and then I can state: ”That’s me.”
So, we decided to use our own photographs along with the anonymous ones, unifying all of them using the same printing process and thus, generating the identity and memories of someone who never existed.
This new exploration has taken the form of ”This is you here”.
"... If we are something, we are our past, aren’t we? Our past is not what can be recorded in a biography or in the newspapers. Our past is our memory. That memory can be hidden or inaccurate—it doesn’t matter. It’s there, isn’t it? It can be a lie but that lie becomes part of our memory, part of us."
- Borges in conversation with Argentinian poet and essayist Osvaldo Ferrari.
Credits:
Albarrán Cabrera