Impermanence

The images I work with are portraits taken at photography studios, with fantasy backdrops, from the late 1800s and early 1900s, which I find in flea markets.

I take these photographs to image manipulators in Mexico City's historic downtown who dedicate themselves to creating fantasy settings for pictures of weddings, quinceañera parties, first communions and christenings. The people in this trade normally cut the characters out of the original photographs and relocate them in fantasy settings—glass pavilions or European castles, haciendas or churches, next to popular cartoon characters, or even alongside Jesus Christ. I am particularly interested in the fact that the photographs I bring them were made by people who were in the same trade a century ago. Contemporary photography studios may have replaced the cameras and brushes of old with computers and Photoshop, but the essence of the work remains the same.

I simply ask the studio technicians to erase the people in the photographs I give them, and then to reconstruct the scenery.

The result is a new image, a hybrid between an old and a contemporary photograph, including the artifice of digital manipulation, a mix of past and present, a composition deprived of its original meaning, empty scenery filled with ghosts.

The images in this project are a result of my dealing with death in my family: my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. These people's deaths determine the slow disappearance of memory, which is replaced by emptiness. This series of twelve photographs also depicts my interest in the transformation of an image in the absence of its primary element: the person portrayed.

Mexico City, 1984. Studied visual art at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda" and took several photography courses at the Centro de la Imagen. His work has been featured in group shows in Mexico, Brazil, Costa Rica, Chile and the United Kingdom. He has presented three solo shows, Paisa-Mex, Impermanencia and Caducifolios, all in Mexico City.