ancillary show / 7 sep 12 oct 2002
Deeez ©
The third and fourth part of 'Mundos Creados' are presented in Het Princessehof Leeuwarden and Galerij Romein. A special part of the programming in Het Princessehof is the premiere of Hannes Wallrafen's new project about Honduras, 'Of Time and the Tropics'. In Galerij Romein the work of five female Mexican photographers is shown.
Lola Alvarez Bravo was the wife of Manuel Alvarez Bravo, one of the most famous and influential photographers Mexico ever produced. She began photographing in the 1930s and influences of photographers such as Edward Weston and Tina Modotti are clearly visible in her early work.
Lola Alvarez Bravo quickly became the favourite photographer of the Mexican cultural elite, most in demand for portraits. Her oeuvre reveals surrealistic and fantastic features, and she photographed many everyday subjects and street scenes. In the mid-1990s Alvarez Bravo was honoured in Mexico with a large retrospective exhibition.
Mexico City: one of the largest cities in the world. So many people, so many faces. So many moods, so many thoughts. Laura Cohen lives and works in this megapolis. She knows a few fellow-residents well, but of many of her compatriots she knows nothing, let alone what is going on in their heads. Yet all these people leave behind an impression on Cohen, and she can identify with what she feels of others. She tries to give form to these feelings in her work. It involves abstract concepts such as chaos, destiny and neurosis, which largely define her own life and that of her compatriots.
Cohen's modified photography enlarges on the series 'Translated Realities', which in 1999 was included in the Noorderlicht exhibition 'Wonderland' in Groningen. Then she manipulated her still lifes and staged studio photographs in triptychs. Now the images regularly run through in diptychs of sheets of photographic paper overlapping one another.
Since 1997 the photographers Jan Kees Helms and Nørb Mommersteeg have worked together under the name Deeez. For the series NUNCA MAS (Never again) the pair photographed Argentine women with a photograph of their disappeared father in their hands. These images alternate with photographs of the sea: during the Videla regime (1976-1981) between 7000 and 9000 people met their death by being dumped into the sea. The series was made after Dutch Crown Prince Willem Alexander and Princess Maxima (daughter of Jorge Zorreguieta, the agriculture minister in the Videla government) declared that her father had known of only three missing persons.
CANTO A UNA NENA NADADORA (Song for a swimming girl) is a series of a young girl playing in the sea. One photo includes a letter from her disappeared father. In it he encourages the girl to go on with her swimming lessons and writes that he will play with her in the sea when he is released.
Flor Garduño is one of the best known contemporary female photographers in Mexico. Her photographs of indigenous cultures and rituals in Latin America are exhibited around the world. Garduño's black and white photography is collected in various books, including 'Testigos del Tiempo' (Witnesses to time, 1992). In it she presents a probing portrait of the daily life of Indians in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador and Peru. It is a visual homage to the tenacity and vitality of these pre-colonial Indian cultures and their traditions.
Maya Goded (Mexico, b. 1970) was pregnant when she began the series SEXO SERVIDORAS (Sexual servants). She was searching for a manner in which to give shape to her doubts and anxieties, arising from this radical physical and emotional change. She wanted to better understand what secrets lay within the female body.
This series of portraits of prostitutes in the La Merced neighbourhood of Mexico City is more than a documentary reportage. Goded herself says of the project, 'When you talk about prostitution, you are talking about women and inequality, about the body, sex and sin, about motherhood, youth and aging, about religion, love and rejection.' While Goded sought an answer to her own questions in Sexo Servidoras, she entered deeply into the lives and world of the prostitutes, and at the same time holds up a mirror before us. Goded received a grant from the W. Eugene Smith Fund to carry on this project.
Graciela Iturbide studied cinema in Mexico City, but ended up in a not uninteresting part-time job in photography, as assistant to Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Moreover, this solo profession gave her complete freedom to travel around Mexico and discover her own country.
Iturbide has no interest in photographic styles or systematic projects. She photographs intuitively and sees the camera primarily as an excuse to come into contact with people, their lives and their celebrations. Working in this spontaneous way, she records the everyday life of Mexicans, in which the time of the Aztecs is always still present in the background.
In 2000 Wietze Landman travelled through Surinam. There, together with the journalist Robert van de Woestijne, he made a number of reportages on the residents of Paramaribo and the interior of Surinam. Among other results was a series of black and white photographs of the primitive life in the interior and the urbane society in Paramaribo, a city with a strange mixture of South American and Dutch influences.
The indigenous peoples apparently lead a quiet life and are at one with nature. The women leave early every morning in the korjaal (dugout canoe) for the vegetable garden, where they cultivate food. In the meantime, the young boys kicking a ball around on a clearing in the rain forest dream of a football career.
In 1980 a fire in the studio of Miguel Rio Branco destroyed a great deal of his archive. At the moment the Brazilian multimedia artist is busy reconstructing this twenty year old collection of negatives and prints. By way of the still existing prints he is trying to recover his earlier work again.
In addition to photographing, Rio Branco is a visual artist and maker of films and videos. Generally he exhibits his work in installations in which the various media are combined with one another. As photographer he focuses primarily on minority groups in his homeland, such as gypsies and Indians. Rio Branco feels a connection with these groups on the edge of society; as the son of a diplomat he grew up outside Brazil and feels himself likewise an outsider. Miguel Rio Branco works regularly for the famous Magnum photo agency. He has been awarded countless prizes for his work.
The photographs of Hannes Wallrafen are like stories: images that he encounters in the world around him or that arise in is own imagination. Wallrafen prefers to work on thematic projects with a clear thread running through them. Previously he published 'Een Dagreis naar Macondo' (A day trip to Macondo), with photographs inspired by the stories of Gabriel García Márquez. For OF TIME AND THE TROPICS (2002) he went to Honduras in search of the memories of the people.
Wallrafen was there confronted with a collective absence of cultural consciousness: books and historical photographic materials are hardly available, historical buildings have made way for new houses, municipal archives went up in smoke and old customs have been forgotten. With this photo project Wallrafen tried to bring this collective past to the surface in images which will also be recognisable for the Hondurans themselves.
The panoramic photographs of Luis Weinstein do not offer the usual wide survey of landscapes or urban situations. Instead, they are reflections on our manner of looking. Rather than surveying a place in one gaze, we collect a series of impressions and experiences, out of which we ultimately construct our image.
Weinstein approaches this concept through a technique which he terms 'superposition'. In it he only partially advances the film in his camera between shots. In this way, overlaps occur on the negative. Through the time between shots and the various camera placements in the ultra-wide angle photographs, Weinstein combines aspects of panoramic photography and film. The end result is a narrative image in which details seem to loom up out of memory.
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