A few minutes ago I have been asked to write a short note about Gaze to Gaze, a photography exhibition that will take place january 2015 in Seville at the Gallery Weber-Lutgen, I find it hard to do because I know how to narrate using pictures but I don't have much practice to do so with words. That's why it costs me exertion to start and I jump into the void staring with a sentence, born from an inspiration.
As you see me, I exist.
My grandfather passed away when my long-term memory was virtually non-existent, only shadows remain which could have arisen from my imagination, telling me how I realized that I was not only my hands, my feet or what perceived by other sensory, auditory, olfactory, and tactile perceptions with which we all start our learning of "being alive".
That morning, in which a cold early spring sun lit up the room where there was a wardrobe with mirror, I gazed in it my grandfather's reflection while he was doing one of the things he most liked to do; carry me on his shoulders. Next to my grandfather’s face, I found another face staring at me.
I don't know if I can recollect, or want to do so, that I looked at whom looked at me showing me exactly what I felt: surprise and curiosity. We became almost immediately friends and when I smiled, showing my incomplete and incipient toothing, he returned a smile to me. I understood, before knowing to pronounce the words, what the bi-unambiguous value of a gaze meant.
Years later I began to take pictures without any justifiable reason, but for to get the pleasure it caused to me... taking photographs and to share through them my memories. I don't know what makes more pleasure to me, nor can I decide which of the two things I need more.
During all these years the image of that person, with whom I became friends, haunts me; not without some absurd frustration because I could not capture it, to be able to show it now rather than scattering words that will never tell what I really lived.
Neither can I make a rough estimate of how many pictures I took in my life, but what I can say with absolute certainty is that all of them tell what I lived in each moment, tell about my or other’s lifes. Capturing surroundings, scenes, compositions; joy and pain, laughter and tears, love and despair, tenderness and hatred; expressions, feelings, looks.
Looks recorded in a scene which tells of the experienced. Looks that focus my attention, because they remember me of that friend with whom I made acquaintance as my grandfather presented him to me, me ignoring that he let me see my own reflection in the mirror. Looks that show what they see; glances starring at me.
In this show, I wanted to share that feeling I lived almost fifty years ago and I relive whenever portraying. To do so, I have renounced to be the "author" whenever I pulled the trigger button of the camera and I left that role in the hands of who wanted to be portrayed, and in the eyes of those who see them. I got comments, some written, in which people say that they see more than what I wanted to tell, should it be so I consider it as an added value.
It only remains for me to thank all those who decided to endow a minute of their lives and those who want to enjoy that minute in this exhibition.
manué Reyes