Found photographs edited and
assembled with post cards, letters and objects
2010 - 2017
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One day, walking through a flea market, I found a photo album 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, by the sea, at historic sites, cities and other landscapes. In none of the photos, they appeared together, which may be an indication that they had no contact with other people on that trip.
The woman looked older than the man, and his gaze through the camera at her fascinated me. I believe they were lovers, an unusual couple on a love journey, probably in secret. I was moved by the abandonment of those photographs, taken and kept with sweetness and affection, and I fantasized about different possibilities for the story of that photo album. My first thought was that this was a forbidden romance. The second: as the attachment to the romantic memory is more typical of the female universe, it was the woman who kept the album. And third, after being preserved in secret over the time, the album was discarded with her death.
From that day on, I began looking for discarded photographs of couples wherever I went. The work presented here is the result of that search: a collection of recurring images of couples found in family albums in almost all cultures. Love stories that were recorded and, at a certain point, discontinued, broken and lost.
This is a work in progress where I create fictional narratives from abandoned memories. I edit the found images, adding colors and combining them with texts and other found images or objects. My intention is to offer a memory for those faded love stories, giving new meaning to the records that were eventually discarded by the end of the relationship, by death or by some immeasurable embarrassment.
The work aims to provide a story, albeit a fictional one, for the anonymous romances, celebrating the encounter and separation of two individuals motivated by love and passion, yet by fear, death and the countless unexpected events of a lifetime.
Found in Amsterdam, 2010
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