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Categories / Portraiture /Tags / albinos / conceptual photography / Latin America / Mexico / Portraiture / South America / Click here to open comments section, click again when done to close / Comments Off

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In my latest essays on photography I have frequently used the term “emplacement”. Emplacement (I usually associate it with the term “displacement”) is one of the representational strategies that best fit the sensibility and thought that legitimize postmodern art. Postmodern art is strongly linked to space, ubiquity, heterotopy and movement, and the representational techniques always correspond to a specific setting. Indeed, this influences the fact that representational techniques frequently become techniques of intervention or obstruction. Thus, the relationship between art and life may seem increasingly a euphemism that refers not to art’s place, but to an art of places, i.e., an art of spaces and positions.

In this context, the recent work of Andrés Carretero is no exception. His method is basically a combination of emplacements and displacements. There would be no other way of understanding his portraits, even if he limited himself to portrayal; i.e., put certain subjects in particular positions in front of a camera (or placed the camera in a specific position with regard to the subjects). But in this case, he has gone further; through portraiture he has only approached an elemental phase within the configuration of people’s identity.

And the truth is that this type of frontal, direct, frugal portrait has functioned for some time now as a very economical way of referring to identity. Who are the people portrayed? What are they “made of”? Normally that matters less than the apparently hidden, but crucial, fact that the relationship between the portrayed and the portrayer creates a particular state of reality, upon which depend both the appearance of what has been photographed and the construction of the photograph as an aesthetic object.

The subject of identity (inevitably associated with the notion of difference) is being treated here from the perspective of social relations, represented in the photographed scenarios. Therefore, the photographic set brings forth a metaphorical ambiance and a kind of textual quality attached to the physical presence of the subjects. Any spectator may experience some discomfort by sensing something out of place, uncomfortable at first glance, as if the camera, instead of being placed in front of the subjects, displaces them.

This sense of being out of place also gives the work its political aspect, since the displacement (albeit an imaginary one) is an indirect way of drawing one’s attention to the displacement these people have to deal with in the social sphere. Their condition does not allow them to participate in certain outdoor activities, since they cannot be exposed carelessly to direct sunlight. In many contexts, they may be considered strange or abnormal, and wherever they are, they always seem foreign. The photographic act could be a means of building an ideal context in which the portrayed individuals do not seem marginal. Finally, an air of abstraction seems to give them a paradoxical normality and a sort of comfortable dignity.

Furthermore – and this is no less significant – they reveal a particular beauty, fragile and subtly vulnerable.