Erika Diettes

SILENCIOS

These are portraits and testimonies of Jews who survived the Nazi Holocaust in Latin America. Each series, dedicated to a specific person, is made up of three images – a portrait, a photograph of a testimony written by the victim, and a photograph of an instance in which holding an object from the past brings the victim back to moments lived during the Second World War (old photographs, identification documents, and objects reminiscent their fate.

Daniel Blaufuks

Daniel Blaufuks has been working on the relation between photography and literature, since My Tangier, with the writer Paul Bowles. His Collected Short Stories includes several photographic diptychs in a kind of “snapshot prose,” where visual fragments suggest private stories on their way to becoming public. The relation between public and private has been one of the constant interrogations in his work.

Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski has received international attention for his large body of work, which has included seminal work in photography, installation, and film, as well as artist’s books. In the late 1960s he turned to films and installations in which he often used masked actors and life-sized dolls, or alternatively, gravitated towards hand-made book and mail art. Appearing off and on in his own work until 1969, when he removed himself from his work, Boltanski concentrated on making color photography until 1984, anticipating the set-up photography of the late 1970s and early 80s. For the past decade and a half, he has been creating installations that explore his longstanding interest in identity, narrative and biography. In these haunting installations which use light bulbs, shadows, blurred 2nd or 3rd-generation prints made from found or borrowed family photos, clothing, and linen, the artist presents personal histories which expose photography’s ties to memory, loss, and mourning, as well as its vulnerabilities to the claim of truth.