BONILLAS, Iñaki
A Sombra e o Brilho
"My grandfather, J. R. Plaza, used to be an enthusiast of the –imaginary— life style of the western American cow-boy. Watching a western film played on an evening TV channel, looking through a brochure of cow-boy guns, posing to be photographed disguised as John Wayne in a stark landscape, or simply dreaming of becoming a real cow-boy, were his most favourite activities.
The day he figured out the way to make his dream real, he did not miss the chance and headed to Wyoming. In less than 9 days he found himself in Rock-Springs, ready to live the adventure of becoming a cow-boy. Less than 30 days went by and on May 18th, 1945, he wrote in his diary: “this is not like the Academy, I ́m totally fooled”. Two months later he would return to Mexico City to continue imagining western life from the confort of the photography studio.
The confrontation, present in the archive, between the bitter reality, as told in his diary, and the warm photographic fiction in which my grandfather preferred to immerse himself, made me develop this project, that is about, fundamentally, the opposition of the two languages contained in the archive: image and text; which represent in this case, respectively, fantasy and fact.
The general idea of the work came to shape after finding a photograph in which my grandfather appeared as a cow-boy in a duel, under which I found a magazine clipping where same scene was depicted as a drawing. The photographic “transcription” that my grandfather did from this illustration, together with my discovery, strangely in Portuguese language, of the story by Jack London, The shadow and the flash, triggered the project, which consisted, in its first stage, precisely of transcribing both the diary and the photographs in the archive. To transcribe the diary, I found most appropriate to use a typewriter machine, to point out the testimonial character of the facts narrated, as opposed to the fictive images which, contrarily, I decided to turn even more blurred through a photographic process that allows to make a negative of a positive, where the front and the back sides of the image blend. The writings inform about reality, whereas the images evoque dreams.
Rather than a simple confrontation between fictive –or imagined- and real, in A sombra e o brilho both dimensions cross and dialogue, as it actually occurs in real life.”
—Iñaki Bonillas
Published by Cru, 2008
Design by Alex Gifreu
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