THE GREAT COMEDY OF LIFE

There are places in the world that are hard to photograph. Places which, with a mere camera and a lens, few could be able to grasp their live essence. There are, as well, people who are difficult to capture on camera. People who, with such an intense and complex personality, present a challenge by no means trifling when the aim is to make them survive in a photo.

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Iquitos and its people are part of this tough universe. It is a town in the Amazonia, rich in history, flora and fauna. A sultry town, with multiple myths and infinite colours. A complex town, with people full of unrivalled and heated enthusiasm.

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Morfi Jimenez met the challenge. Camera in hand, he rummaged through the remotest corners of this earth and pierced right through the souls of their inhabitants unearthing a surprising and larish universe. After long journeys in the last four years Jimenez has taken us back to that risky boundary where fiction and document rarely meet. Once again, Jimenez emerges victorious. Feeling at ease, Morfi cruises the warm waters of the Amazon River, recording daily happenings, which, framed within the hardiness of the jungle, are people with tantalizing characters. These individuals, all of them sharing an intense and particular history, look as if they were acting-out their own fiction.

Thus, Jimenez “stages” each story, one where the character is given a leading role that he may act-out the story which best suits him, that which life itself set before him and one which only an “Iquiteño” know how to play with unbounded glee. The photographer may be seen as “Stage Manager”, bent on obtaining of the actor best possible performance of the comedy of his own life.

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The show goes on along the humid streets along the river coast. The lens in Jimenez ́s camera opens up, in a “quasi- theatrical” frame, the light projecting an intense dramatic motion. His is a distinctively personal chromatic research, which rescues that utopic and unreachable Amazonian colour. Morfi ́s is a “fictional documentation” in which original elements of reality are moved into a magical surrounding but without depriving them of any authenticity.

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Reality-fiction, fiction-reality: life ́s a great comedy.

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Carlos Caamaño
Curator