Curator: Laura González Flores
Nº of works: 80 b/w photographs
Availability: from September 2014.
Contact: Ana Berruguete
This exhibition explores the photographs of two American masters, Harry Callahan and Edward Weston, through the relationships of vision and desire. While the well-known bodies of works have been understood as nudes or landscapes, we wish to look beyond these categories, which here may be considered limitations, to propose a more ample and complex notion of erotic photography.
He, She, It proposes a remarkable reading of the images by Callahan and Weston through the relationship of the body and nature, but also, photography and affection: to the difference of the majority of erotic photography that seeks to impulse desire through visual pulsion (erotic photography as escopofile), in Callahan and Weston we find the extremely particular case of desire made image: one of the photographic subjects that sees, but also loves, another photographic subject. It is not, therefore, of a woman, but of their woman.
Thus we find ourselves before a specific case of erotic expression in which the subjectivity and affection occupy a fundamental place. The photographic act reveals an enological echo of a loving act: an absolute instant of connection, through the vision, with the loving being. From the infinitely possible ways of seeing photography, this is, probably, the most intersubjective, because is not only something seen (or better said, a something that transforms in something concrete), but that, inevitably, this something concrete corresponds to our vision.
If something distinguishes the photographs of Callahan and Weston is the complicity between the photographer and the model: may be for the corporal gesture or the quality of his view, in these photos we verify the possibility of intersubjective construction of the image. Even though they are images of desire, they show that they are more, Tina o Charis in the images of Weston, or Eleonor in those by Callanah, they are people –unique and irreplaceable women, with a characteristic body, that cover the artists’ image with the dense and complex veil of affection.
