Foto Mala

Casa Quien and Centro de la Imagen present "Foto Mala", as part of the Photography and Moving Image Festival, PHOTOIMAGEN. The opening will be held on September 6th at 7 pm, in the presence of the artist.

Elisa Bergel Melo is not a stranger to PHOTOIMAGEN nor to the Centro de la Imagen. In 2012 she participated in the Vth edition of the festival and in 2014 showed her solo show "Remembrance / Return" in the aforementioned cultural institution. A common denominator is perceived in previous and recent works: the representation of memory in her artistic practice. This also includes its forms of registration, documentation and conservation. In the case of Bergel Melo, through digital storage devices and chemical photography archive, or reel, as is popularly known.

For this new staging, the artist born in Venezuela and settled in Dominican Republic, scans in their negatives in black and white, digitizes them and makes contact sheets. In others words, she turns a whole series of latent frames into images that are reinterpreted and acquire a new dimension when they are revised and re-constructed, after the passing of a decade.

It is important to highlight in this artistic project, which has just begun, is this new from the value of the portrait, of the photographed subject, of its identity and gender, as well as as the context in which these photographs were originally captured. Value and quality of the image are also analyzed in this sample. Using the same photograph -in the way of a great Pantone- in black and white, the artist questions the Ansel Adams zone system in the digital age, and supports its hypothesis that there is not a single option to choose the correct tonal values for a "good exposure".

After analyzing this new proposal on the image of Elisa Bergel Melo, we can coincide with François Soulages, in his idea that the photographic work "is an open work, necessarily open, living work that acquires a new dimension and a new destiny in every realization".

The Exhibition will be on view until October 20th.