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FRIDA KAHLO: The Camera and the Image
Photo by Nickolas Muray
In 1925, Frida was riding in a bus that collided with a tram and suffered injuries that caused her to be in pain for much of the rest of her life. Following this accident, her father was instrumental in helping her recapture her indomitable spirit. That same year, he gave all of his children a portrait of himself inscribed with the words "Every now and then remember the affection your father has always had for you”. His peculiarly forceful gaze in this photograph is reminiscent of the intensity of Frida’s own forthright gaze in her self-portraits.
It was during her long, slow recovery that Frida first began to paint self-portraits, the genre she preferred for the rest of her career. It was her mother who had conceived the idea of rigging up the apparatus that allowed her to paint while bedridden, but her choice of self-portraiture was a mixture of expediency and her father’s influence. The first self-portrait Frida completed was Self-Portrait, 1926 and when she had finished it she mimicked her father’s earlier gesture by choosing to give the painting to her boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias, as a token of her love and in the hope that he would not forget her.
Most of Frida’s self-portraits were painted using the mirror, and her model became her reflected image, facilitating a substitution of symbolic space for her actual environment. Frida filled this space, in her self-portraits as well as in several of her other works, with the accoutrements of portrait photography, such as props, costumes and backcloths. Frequently her subject appears to float in front of a space rather than within it, with the background reminiscent of a photographer’s backdrop. □ Excerpt from Frida Kahlo: Portrait of an Icon □
MANEL ARMENGOL: Seeing the World in a Grain of Sand
According to Armengol the black background he utilizes in all of the alphabet images refers to the genesis of time, to the darkness before light. They speak to us of the allegory of space and time, about the mystery of life and our underlying quest for its essential values. Their lines, enigmatic strokes from some arcane pen, black empty spaces that trap a tiny gesture, hint at directions that could be taken. The work can also be viewed as a kind of game -- one’s own values can be linked to the representations, in the form of a symbolic language, as though they were fundamental in establishing the graphic expression of what would then become an “alphabet”.
“Alphabet Signs” may be informed by the Tarot, but it is overwhelmingly an alphabet for our era. Despite its esoteric symbolism, there is much of the human condition in it. In addition to being a reflection on our existence in these unsettling times, it contains fragility, a hint of pathos and a certain fallibility that is all too human.
The piece is actually comprised of 21+1 photos-signs; the extra one being the “Zero” which is usually exhibited more prominently than the others, as it should be, for the zero has powerful connotations and here against a void-black backdrop it speaks volumes.
However, Armengol’s pared down Zero is slightly wobbly, somewhat frail and frayed at the edges. In fact, it looks like it might well have stood up from a page in one of Samuel Beckett’s plays and would not look altogether out of place rolling along that country road in Waiting for Godot. □ Excerpt from Manel Armengol: Herbarium □
Mariana Yampolsky: Memória
By far, the aim of Mariana Yampolsky’s photography is to make palpable Mexico’s diversity through images of its architecture, landscape and most significantly, its pastiche of cultures. She photographed a Mexico that exists primarily as collective memory -- the memory of its indigenous past or “first nation”. Yampolsky worked untiringly to preserve the memory of this other world, to breathe life into the past as she photographed its remnants. Like her great-uncle the anthropologist, Yampolsky too excavates the past, through the use of her camera she sifts through the sediment of centuries and brings to light the symbolic gestures that formed the backbone of these cultures.
Her most celebrated body of work is a series of images of the Mazahua nation whose traditions and ceremonies she photographed extensively. A selection of these photographs is reproduced in her book Mazahua published in 1993. The majority of her depictions of the Mazahua are heroic as reflected in her seminal image Mujeres Mazahua (Mazahua Women). Most Mexicans’ contact with the Mazahuas, however, is as the depreciatively called “Marias”; female street vendors who sell trinkets in the maze of traffic that is Mexico City. Yampolsky chooses to ignore this modern-day ignominy of the Mazahua and portray instead the memory of the past present in the Mazahua community today; the extraordinary tenaciousness with which ancient tradition is preserved in the face of such an onslaught. □ Excerpt from Mariana Yampolsky: Memoria □
Copyright © 2011 Margaret Hooks.
Copyright © 2011 Margaret Hooks.
This website and its contents are the copyright of Margaret Hooks. Any redistribution or reproduction of part or all of the content in any form is prohibited without the express written permission of the copyright holder. It should not transmitted or stored in any other website or other form of electronic retrieval system.
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Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2007.
Da Capo Press, New York, 2000; Pandora/HarperCollins, London, 1993.
Turner, Madrid; Bloomsbury, London; D.A.P., New York, 2003; 2006
Phaidon Press Ltd, London, 2005; 2006.
Turner/A-R Press, Mexico City, 2008
Turner, Madrid 2007; A-R Press, D.A.P., New York 2008.
Aperture, New York, 1999. |
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