Replenishing Emptiness by Alfredo De Stéfano (June 1, 2010) 
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Categories / Conceptual Photography / Constructed Landscape / / Click here to open comments section, click again when done to close / 1 Comment
Introduction by Patricia Gouvea
Photographs feed me. Photographs transport me. Photographs leave a mark on me. Photographs open a gap in ordinary time or transform the ordinary in extraordinary.
This selection of photographic works does not have a master line: they constitute just one part of the images that in some moment aroused emotion in me and for that reason accompany me to these days. These are works from artists as different as their paths, reflections and challenges that each theme provoked, leading them to create methods, concepts and solutions to turn into matter what is born reverie.
Some projects look closer to documentation, like the trance funk Totoma! by Daniela Dacorso. Or the portraits of the domestic workers and their bosses, by the Slovak Andrej Balco (who, after a period of time in Rio, escaped from the cliché poorness – violence, looking at the carioca middle class). Or, still, the Baixo Estácio by the very carioca A.C. Junior, where Samba is more silence than happiness.
Other projects point to gaps and small signs left on the skin of the urban tissue, that talk about love and pain, like the series Love Story, by Leonardo Ramadinha. And to enigmatic landscapes that could only exist in the mind of dreamers like the Argentine photographer Esteban Pastorino that, in the series Kite Aerial Photography, turns into models places photographed from a kite fitted with a handmade camera. How not to be attentive also to the humorous and self-explicative Sobremim (About Me), by Isabela Lira? And to the Mexican Alfredo De Stéfano who, in his series Replenishing Emptiness, makes the desert a territory of the ephemeral, with his experiences of intimacy and relativization of nature?
Make these images yours, take them with you wherever you go, be attentive to the thickness of time that exists in each one of them. A more frenetic time or a more decelerated time, it doesn’t matter. Just stop and observe.
Next / Mixing Authenticity With Stereotypes / Previous / A Kite Lifts The Camera Up Into The Air /
Our poll "A photo essay always needs a great written story" closed. 267 people voted, 28% agrees, 72% disagrees. 233 people answered our follow-up question "Are you a photographer?" 82% indicated they are, 18% said no. Initially, negative answers to question #1 were almost 100% as was the pecentage of photographers among respondants. Then, when the level of non-photographers started to rise, the percentage of people indicating good text is always essential started to rise too. This seems to indicate that non-photographers think that adding good text to your photo essays is essential. In my opinion: if you want non-photographers to dig your work, you know what to do...
In my photographs from the last few years, I have intervened upon the landscape, creating scenes or sets with a wide range of natural and manmade elements.
In this way, amidst the sometimes oppressive vastness, I construct and photograph intimate spaces: some of them are metaphors for the painful desertification of the planet caused by man, while others work as ironic allusions to our relationship with the desert.
The action I perform deals with reintegration: it’s a reflection on what the desert has lost, but also a way of restoring its ravaged memory through a personal intervention.
Obviously, in the desert, this intervention is something ephemeral, but nonetheless transcendent in the photographic memory that has managed to lend substance to a desire.
Excerpt of “Configuring Space,” by Alejandro Castellanos, Director of Centro de la Imagen, México City: Alfredo De Stéfano recycles his experience of the desert; that territory stigmatized as representative of the absence of life which in fact contains an astonishing diversity of beings whose strenght is the result of an adaptation capacity that manifests its integrity before space. The original power, Alfredo De Stéfano tells us through his work, resides in the solvency with which the environment is charged in the action of designating its meaning and therefore of configurating it.
Among the innovative proposals arisen in this field during the last decade, the modernized representation of the vast Northern Mexican territories by Alfredo De Stéfano is based on a concept: intervention, that is to say, the alteration of matter that allows him to fracture, and therefore identify the passing of the time, settled on (fixed or moving) image and installation.
Alfredo De Stéfano (1961) lives and works in Saltillo, Mexico.
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[...] série Sobremim (About Me), de Isabela Lira, e o trabalho do mexicano Alfredo De Stéfano, Replenishing Emptiness, que transforma o deserto em um território do efêmero e trabalha com a intimidade e [...]