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Fotos encontradas (Center for Photography, Montevideo): a small exhibition with some of the more than two hundred photos found in the streets of Montevideo between 2001 and 2007.
I’ve been interested in these objects and the entire phenomenon of the abandoned and found photos for many years, and wrote about it an essay published in the Foto Club Uruguayo magazine CONTACTO. Now (in 2013) the FP archive has gone much bigger and I’m working on a new phase of the project and a book. The FP is a fundamental issue in various and interestings researchs in the art world, the anthropology and visual studies all around the globe, like Found Photo Foundation in England, a project of the portuguese artist Paula Roush. It is possible to find a lot of Internet sites dedicated to FP. Some of them, like this argentinian page offer some tools and useful links besides a beautiful collection. Talking about FE, the most attractive issue for me is that of the categories we can use for order and interpretate them. I first tried to read them as a corpus from formal, chronological, tematic and topographical points of view, but it is not enough. In this exhibition, I used other categories, focusing not on the narratives but rather on how these pictures challenge us from their specific content and in which manners they teach us some things about how no-photographers think about photography, and the ways they face problems like beauty, interest and pose, and the functions of pictures like anchors of memory that people can use and reject as any object and also manipulate them, make them record and show the marks of expressive acts we can choose to look and keep, or not. And why not. So, the FP in the exhibition were distributed in entitled groups, each one of them facing some specific problem: ON PUDEUR (ABOUT SHOWING LOST HAPPINESS OF OTHER PEOPLE), ON WAYS OF RIPPING, ON BEAUTY, ON HIGH PLACES, FACING THE CAMERA (ATTITUDE), ON THE PERSISTENCE OF OLD METAPHORS:
Recently, I have worked around bigger groups of photos found in nearby places, and collections. Some of them are a complete love story or the documents of a long journey. There is some strange quality in “abstract” examples like this, too:
and an estrangement in a curious absence in some puzzled photos:
Also, new and disturbing possibilities of ripping:
and incredible works of chance and outdoor conditions:
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