Assignment 5: Removing the figure

I would like to end this course with an assignment where I reflect on a topic directly related to my feelings. I do not want to make a long theoretical introduction as in previous works, presenting to the reader a long reasoning of motivations, I will simply say, as a preamble, that this series wants to be a tribute to my mother, enclosed for more than three years, in the pain and forgetfulness of a degenerative disease that initially robbed her ability to speak and progressively has deteriorated the rest of her faculties.

Exercise 5.3

Every day has its routines, the same actions repeated once and again, for weeks, for months, for year.. Little actions that have no more importance that sustain our lives in progress. To wake up, to shower, to have breakfast, to get dress… There is little room for improvisation and we have to do all these things according to our daily agenda.

Exercise 5.2

Difficult to imagine a bored place than the small square that I can see from my room window. It’s a place where pedestrian do what they usually do… pass through it, so I’m willing to confront one of most challenging experience of my life, spend an entire hour observing and describing what happens in a hot summer Sunday in that nameless square.

Exercise 5.1

This exercise asks for a series of still-life pictures showing traces of life without using people, so I ask permission to some relatives to allow me to take a picture of their beds just as they got up from them.

Research Point 2

For some time now, I have been nurturing the idea that “aging” will be the theme of my last assignment. It seems as though I feel the urge to make a deep reflection about how my life is facing a new station, time to reflect about existence and expectations. A kind of vital testament, as Beethoven did in Heiligenstadt.

Research Point 1

“Through photography, quotidian matter is give a visual charge and imaginative possibility beyond its everyday function”. This paragraph from the chapter 4 “Something and Nothing” of the book “The Photograph as Contemporary Art” summarizes perfectly the strategy of using ordinary objects in a photography project.

Absence and signs of life – Reflection

“..if a stranger sought out in a good season the people and places described here they would probably seem clearly similar to their pictures, and the stranger would asume that the pictures mirrored real life. It would be marvellous if this were the case, if the place itself, and not merely the pictures, where the work of art”

Jim Goldberg (notes)

American photographer recognized for his books and long-term photographic projects, where he uses different types of formats: photo-collage, written texts, video, audio, and above all the active participation of the subjects to mean the photos in which they participate. He has been a Magnum photographer since 2002.

Kaylynn Deveney (notes)

Based on the storyboard of Doña Josefa that I drew a few weeks ago, I conceived the idea of a photographic project that takes as starting point this story and builds a set of images that more or less literally fits the story.