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Taking photos. Making photos.

by Jano Cortijo & Alice Vega

The accessibility and familiarity that the photographic practice has achieved in recent times has caused a confusion of limits between what is implied in the work of creating an image through this medium and the mere reproduction of an immediate reality.

We are all capable of using photography like we use our memory: fixing instants of what happens before our eyes. But the possibility of recreating those events and incidents to the point where we can turn them into new images, capable of proposing other ways of seizing the world, only occurs when one develops a process that begins with the conception of ideas and implies the handling of a language.

two photographers presents the work of two visual artists who have been exploring concrete interests through a syntax that has become more and more identifiable. Clearly recognizable situations and contexts are subject to a process of abstraction through the precise partitioning of bodies or objects and the use of color as a decisive element in their proposals.

Ricardo Ascoy records the dance of a couple in a sequence that emulates the first photographic experiments dedicated to the breaking up of movement in single images. The series Baila urbano (Dance urban) takes an anthropological slant by depicting a popular manifestation where commonly vernacular features have been ‘contemporary-fied’ as part of our endless process of search for identity.

Paola Vera discretely and dramatically scrutinizes the domestic environment to turn daily objects into props of a timeless Escenario (Stage) where some story has finished, takes place or is about to begin. This furtive glance inspects the place in an apparent search that, finally, draws us in and turns us into confidants of a narration whose peaks seem to be emphasized by those amplified details.

The projects presented by these two photographers establish a clear frontier between what implies taking a photograph and making a photograph: both have been developed from clear objectives and are the product of processes aimed towards the consolidation of their proposals.

presentation text for the exhibition “two photographers” by Ricardo Ascoy and Paola Vera Trujillo, September 2004