neyde lantyer

                                                              
         

__________



          

One day, walking around at a flea market, I found a photo-album with pictures of a couple on vacations in the region of Provence-France, probably in the 60s. They traveled alone, isolated from the rest of the world, taking photographs of each other in the fields, on seashores, in cities, historic sites and other landscapes.

There were no photos in which they appeared together, indicating that they hadn’t been in contact with other people during that trip. The woman looked older than the man and his gaze thru the camera - on her - fascinated me. In my eyes, they were lovers, an atypical couple on a love trip, probably in secret.

 

I was moved by the abandonment of those photographs, taken and kept with gentleness and affection, and I fantasised about different possibilities for the story told in that photo-album.

My first thought was: that was a forbidden romance; the second: since the attachment to the romantic recollection is more proper to the feminine universe, the woman was the one who kept the album. And third: after having been preserved in secret along the time, the album was discarded with her death.

                                                                                               

From that day I started to seek discarded photographs of couples wherever I go and the work presented here is the result of that search: a collection of recurring photos of couples, usually found in family albums in all cultures. Love stories that were registered and in a certain point discontinued, broken and lost.

This is a work in progress where I create fictional narratives from abandoned memories by editing the original pictures, adding color and matching them with new ones of my own, texts and other found images. I want to offer narrative for those faded love stories and re-signifying the found records discarded by the end of the relationship, death or some immeasurable embarrassment.

The work is intended to give the anonymous romances a memory, albeit fictional, to tribute the encounter and the separation of two people motivated by love and passion and, nonetheless fear, death and countless life events.