LIGHT FROM WITHIN
THE LAST FRONTIER
2007 - 2008
The limits between different artistic disciplines have been becoming ever more diffuse. This phenomenon is frequently seen in photography where pre-established genres such as photo art, documentary, graphic reporting and even, with more subtlety, fashion and advertising photography have been increasingly found at a formal and conceptual level in the works of contemporary photographers.
The light in this body of work does not escape this situation. In fact, moreover Morfi Jiménez documents the same with bravado and doesn’t shy away from experimenting with different photographic genres, almost all of them development by Jimenez himself throughout his productive career. Not surprisingly, this series marks his beginnings in artistic photography. He produced this series after many years of practicing varied photography techniques.
Carrying his camera and ever-present light, Jiménez passes through genres and mountains to descend into Cusco and Puno and document in the most personal manner the people, their squares and streets, fields, or in other words, their everyday life in a location gracefully illuminated by nature. In this journey, the photographer’s gaze is obliged to cover diverse categories as probably a single category would not be sufficient to unveil the wide-ranging visual and thematic scope that his camera discovered in the Andes. In that discovery there are two elements that definitely captured Morfi’s attention: light and colour. As such, both the light at the moment of taking the picture and colour in the digital developing are accentuated in the hands (or should that be the eyes?) of the photographer. They invite the observer to lose oneself in a chimeric, fantasy and unknown world.
Just as both exact and general photographic techniques create a dialogue with more plastic and personal forms, constructing a visual discourse that pushes the limit of the delicate dividing line to represent a reality that needs to push through frontiers and be understood with common purposes.
Carlos Caamaño
Espacio Fotográfico Gallery