Daily Dose 1276

Albarrán Cabrera

Daily Dose From now to your death 1276 | Albarrán Cabrera "My grandfather was an amateur photographer who used his view camera as a portable laboratory. When I was about 8, I became his “assistant,” which only meant I was allowed to hold a leg of his tripod. I remember moments in which he would photograph me then show me a piece of paper still soaked with fixer. He would tell me: “This is you.” When we look at a photograph related to our experiences, our intangible and unreliable memories surrender to the printed image. The concrete photographs replace our abstract memories, and our identity is certified by that set of photographs. Some time ago, a friend gave us some negatives and old postcards he had found inside a picture wallet in the trash. After scanning the negatives, we found they were family portraits taken about 40 years ago by an amateur photographer. All shared a common feature: they were underexposed, so it was hard to recognize the people pictured. The family could belong to anyone. Those moments, that formed part of the photographer’s identity, could also be ours. So, we decided to use our own photographs along with the anonymous ones, unifying all of them using the same printing process and thus generating the identity and memories of someone who never existed." —Albarrán Cabrera (Anna P. Cabrera & Angel Albarrán) Via LensCulture.