In this series, for which I have appropriated Talbot’s title, The Pencil of Nature, I am aiming to create a space to remember the history of photographic portraits of women through the lens of male photographers, (as well as self-portraits exploring what happens in playing with the gender of certain poses found in photographs by men). I work with a Hasselblad, black and white film, and natural lighting. The demands imposed by the camera’s weight and sound return me to the past, to the seventies and eighties in the photography studio of my childhood, while also compelling me to feel my body as we work.
This exercise takes me back to a place in which I learned from my father’s eye and from that of other men.
Teachers, colleagues, and the photographers I assisted, as well as others whom I have admired such as Newton, Araki, Álvarez Bravo, Avedon, Halsman, Furuya, Mapplethorpe, and Man Ray appear in my mind as masters with authority. I review their photos again and though I have seen them a countless times, now I am directing women to imitate and act out the poses that have been choreographed by them, seeking to learn something new, something I had not understood, to later reinterpret them.
I use the failure in fixing images on paper in Talbot’s initial experiments, as something that offers us the opportunity to reinvent and rearrange the elements that compose our representation.
