Photographs to resist oblivion

In December 2017, in the days after the death of her father, while Julieta Averbuj (Barcelona, ​​1986) was examining the family photo albums, one image particularly attracted her attention.

In it her own face and her father's disappeared under a constellation of mushrooms.

A halo of unreality created by the effect of humidity in the photographic emulsion that, while enhancing the strength of the image as a whole, alluded to the fragility of memory, to the submission and malleability of memories and memories. materials to the ravages of time.

Thus, that tender image of a girl who throws herself into the arms of a father makes up the nucleus, material and immaterial, of the photobook to which it has given rise:

(Nº 89 Cuadernos de la Kursala / Fuego Books), a delicate publication, conceived as a fold-out, with which the author pays tribute to her father, whose multiple readings speak of the construction of memory and its indecipherable and changing paths. .

Image belonging to the book 'O livro de Patrícía', by David-Alexandre Guéniot, published by Ghost Editions, 2022.David-Alexandre Guéniot

Image belonging to the book 'O livro de Patrícía', by David-Alexandre Guéniot, published by Ghost Editions, 2022.David-Alexandre Guéniot

Image belonging to the book 'O livro de Patrícía', by David-Alexandre Guéniot, published by Ghost Editions, 2022.David-Alexandre Guéniot

Image belonging to the book 'O livro de Patrícía', by David-Alexandre Guéniot, published by Ghost Editions, 2022.David-Alexandre Guéniot

Image belonging to the book 'O livro de Patrícía', by David-Alexandre Guéniot, published by Ghost Editions, 2022.David-Alexandre Guéniot

Image belonging to the book 'O livro de Patrícía', by David-Alexandre Guéniot, published by Ghost Editions, 2022.David-Alexandre Guéniot

Image belonging to the book 'O livro de Patrícía', by David-Alexandre Guéniot, published by Ghost Editions, 2022.David-Alexandre Guéniot

Cover of the book 'El juego de la Madelena', by Julieta Averbuj, published by Fuego Books, 2022.Julieta Averbuj (Fuego Books)

Image belonging to the book 'El juego de la Madelena', by Julieta Averbuj, published by Fuego Books, 2022.Julieta Averbuj (Fuego Books)

Image belonging to the book 'El juego de la Madelena', by Julieta Averbuj, published by Fuego Books, 2022.Julieta Averbuj (Fuego Books)

Image belonging to the book 'El juego de la Madelena', by Julieta Averbuj, published by Fuego Books, 2022.Julieta Averbuj (Fuego Books)

Image belonging to the book 'El juego de la Madelena', by Julieta Averbuj, published by Fuego Books, 2022.Julieta Averbuj (Fuego Books)

Image belonging to the book 'El juego de la Madelena', by Julieta Averbuj, published by Fuego Books, 2022.Julieta Averbuj (Fuego Books)

Image belonging to the book 'El juego de la Madelena', by Julieta Averbuj, published by Fuego Books, 2022.Julieta Averbuj (Fuego Books)

Image belonging to the book 'El juego de la Madelena', by Julieta Averbuj, published by Fuego Books, 2022.Julieta Averbuj (Fuego Books)

The title of the book refers to a game invented by the author's father, through which he reconverted the events that occupied the news daily into new stories where the madeleine was always a central motif.

At the same time it refers us to the involuntary memory associated with Marcel Proust;

to that smell, that taste, that gesture or that image that is capable of reviving a memory or reminiscence in the person who perceives it to immediately transport them to a forgotten episode of his life.

In this way, Averbuj was giving shape to a complex and enigmatic network of images, all of them from the family album, which allows the reader to build different combinations, or memories.

In order to find a more universal meaning in handling a family album, the author chose to use fragments of the photographs and enlarge them.

In this way, the reader makes the images his own as he makes his way through the layers of an intricate forest of memories, where some of the images seem to carry more meaning than others, giving shape to a powerful visual story that is completed with a few loose sentences.

Phrases that could allude to childhood memories, whose printing on transparent paper provides more intimacy to the whole.

“I am interested in the issue of the materiality of the image,” says Averbuj, whose artistic training comes from experimental cinema.

“None of the images are retouched.

I have respected the original dirt, the specks of dust, the threads, just as I found them,

the mushrooms and the same texture of the photographic paper on which the photo is printed, with the purpose of talking about the passage of time.

And not only from a material point of view but also on a historical level, in reference to that time when family photos were printed and kept”.

A cluster of textures that can sometimes seem real and invite the reader to check it out, giving the photobook a tactile character that is consolidated with the type of paper used.

Image belonging to the book 'El juego de la Madelena', by Julieta Averbuj, published by Fuego Books, 2022.Julieta Averbuj (Fuego Books)

In the same way, the use of a color palette where grays are interspersed, sepia with a range of muted colors suggests to the reader a range in some way we tend to associate with memory recovery.

It corresponds to a series of decisions that the author was making intuitively and that have been justified by the final result.

A path of fragile fragments of imprecise beauty that never ceases to remind us that everything is finite and that perpetuity is made of the material and texture of which dreams and memory are made.

When the past becomes an eternal present

When the photographer Patrícia Almeida died in November 2017, a funeral home employee asked her partner, the editor David-Alexandre Guéniot, to choose a photograph to accompany the coffin “Which photograph to choose?”

Guéniot wondered.

How to give presence to someone who is no longer there?

What kind of presence is that that can summarize what it symbolizes?

Must it refer to a single moment in her life?

At the end of its existence?

Or at his most splendid moment?

That approach to the search for that impossible image, as well as the need to learn to live the absence of someone in the hard process of mourning, led to a book,

(Ghost Editions).

An intimate and poetic, visual and literary story about loss, which serves the author to investigate the characteristics of the photographic image and its relationship with death, and likewise recover the essence of the absent person, that which is incorruptible by time.

Divided into three parts:

,

, and

, the book brings together nearly 70 texts that accompany the photographs taken by Patrícia, her portraits, film sequences, paintings, notebook clippings, song lyrics, extracts from books and other documents on the evolution of photographic technique and its reception.

And, how could it have been otherwise, numerous connections are established with Roland Barthes'

, the work that the photographer began to read the year she shot her first reel, in which the French writer reflects on the value of the images from a photograph of his missing mother, an image that he never shows.

Image belonging to the book 'O livro de Patrícía', by David-Alexandre Guéniot, published by Ghost Editions, 2022.David-Alexandre Guéniot

Among Patrícia's belongings were the documents with which the photographer worked to shape a personal history of photography.

An unfinished project that the author used as a basis to shape her story and give presence to the absent one.

"While I was putting together different pieces that she had, I remembered Barthes' words about the paradox that photography poses to those who look at the image of a dead person," Guéniot highlights during a telephone conversation.

“He is dead and she will die”, wrote the Frenchman, alluding to the portrait of Lewis Payne (a young man accused of murder and sentenced to death by hanging photographed by Alexander Gardner in 1865), something that is still a cognitive dysfunction;

a contradiction”.

The writing process also involved a paradox.

"When we go through a duel we tend to think that if we don't feel pain we will lose the person again," warns Guéniot.

“It is our way of feeling united to her.

So writing was a way of remembering Patrícia and forgetting her.

Finishing the book would mean that my relationship with her could end.

A photograph shows a crumpled paper where the quote from the German author Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, known as Jean Paul, is written: "Remembrance is the only paradise from which we cannot be expelled", a sentence that he contradicts on the following pages with a quote by Jean-Luc Godard: "Memory is the only hell to which we are condemned in all innocence."

Both quotes allude to the resistance shown by the photographic medium to oblivion and its ability to transform the past into an eternal present.

Thus,

it is an attempt to transform death into something alive.

A construction that deals with the inability of memory to reconstruct an accurate portrait of the absent person while dealing with how to shape an absence and the type of presence that can be given to someone after their death.

One more reaffirmation that photography is as linked to love as it is to death.

'

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