Crude Metaphors, A few words but a tale: The Fucking Family
Adriana Salazar Arroyo
All stories have, explicitly or implicitly, a fantastic dimension. They try to recapture or reveal, or anticipate, time. They finally borrow as Walter Benjamin said, their authority from death. They broaden the field of social behaviour to admit new desires, new demands of both the individual and the collective being. They see human beings as both transparent and enigmatic. They make each of us, because of our fears, because of our violence, because of our love, because of our death –indispensable unique beings, that is also why so much of our literature is angry. Also why it is tender and merciful.
Carlos Luis Fuentes, The Story Teller.
The work of Guadalupe Ruiz situates photography under the tensions of its potential for narrative. In her online portfolio, the viewer is exposed to a vertical column of portraits arranged under a year and a title. A similar approach has been used for a series of publications where they are grouped in different books, one for each year. This grouping expands beyond a mere means of chronological organisation. It acts more as a way to create links between the images which can be thus understood as moments in time where something of relevance is happening. By being presented in relation to other photographs, each image becomes a short event that is part of a series of other events together forming a greater episode. They are put to work much like a sentence would in a paragraph or a paragraph would in a text.
In The Story Teller Carlos Fuentes introduces the Latin American short story. Here he proposes its need for immediacy. The epiphany, defined as ‘the fugitive moment of authentic knowledge’ , which would in Joyce or Proust ‘[appear] suddenly and exceptionally, immersed … in a vast ocean of narration’ , must in the short story occur in synchronicity with the telling of the tale. He pairs this quality to the social yearning for these instants in the midst of turmoil. In a similar way to how each sentence is swelled by having to multitask, daily life stretches between responding to immediate necessities and the seeking of these times of deep understanding. It, life, has to be both, at once. A similar tension is also present in Ruiz’s portraits. They operate almost in opposition to how a Thomas Ruff would for instance. Ruff proposes the photograph devoid of a capacity to disclose personality, making the thinness of the surface sharply evident. Ruiz instead makes it seem as if photography’s job is to disclose something of profundity whilst it is focused on the ordinary or the everyday. It should maybe not be surprising that the verb used in Spanish to describe the process of a photograph coming to life is not to develop but to reveal: revelar. This is also what happens with the moment of epiphany, something is realised, something comes to light, not so much freezing a fraction of time but extending it. The literary epiphany that Fuentes describes differs from the arrival at truth of the eureka moment so prevalent in contemporary photography. The disclosure that is made at this point is closely bound to fantasy. Paradoxical as it may be, the literary epiphany is a fabricated moment of revelation, a standpoint from which to consider the photograph perhaps.
Much of Guadalupe Ruiz’s work is a game where the fictitious and the factual meet. The subjects are members of her Colombian family, situated in a context and dressed up to acquire a stereotypical identity. In La Saga (2005), Ruiz adopts the name of a soap opera that became incredibly popular in Latin America. Here she draws on the relevance that these television ‘stories’ have for everyday life. They appear with the regularity of a staple at meal times. The home is no doubt permeated by the telenovela of the moment. In La Saga (2005), the photographer’s family members become drug-traffickers, sensual heroines or heroines to be, a pair of new young lovers. They do it with great comfort making it difficult at times for the viewer to resolve how much of a farce the portrait is.
Ruiz’s images appear to stem out of an awareness of certain nuances in her culture of origin. For a voluntary exile such as her, going back to Colombia from Switzerland and photographing her relatives year after year could be a way to extend those brief moments of understanding of one’s culture, which one seems to have when one arrives home after having been afar. In the series ‘La Bella Suiza (2007)’the photographer plays with the irony of there being a place in Bogota with high mountains and a lake called ‘The Beautiful Switzerland’. Here the site itself becomes an accomplice in the game, not even having to dress up but simply possessing the costume granted by a name that was already taken, a name that also carries with it a geographical and cultural identity. One could let history flood in at this point. One could begin to speak about European colonialism, the effects that the old empire has had on the American continent and the continuous aspirations of poorer countries to develop into something like its Northern ‘models’. And as much as this is of relevance what seems yet more pressing is the playfulness of photographing an ‘alpine’ landscape in tropical Colombia and then exporting these images that look like Switzerland back to Switzerland. This is a strategy that pokes the preconceptions that one culture has of another and of itself, and again, we are able to see reality being teased. We are able to see that even certified things, like names, are made up.
It would be dangerous to state that Latin American culture is at ease with mistaken identities. It is nonetheless possible to point at what seems to be an effortless integration of fantasy into the everyday. It is as if Magical Realism is not just a literary movement or a strategy for cultural production; it is as if in Latin America, the invented can hardly be distinguished from the ordinary.
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