Alejandro Acevedo
Favourite Photographer
Harry Gruyaert
What makes a good photograph?
For me, a photograph is good if it reaches emotion in a restrained and suggestive way, and if it creates other possibilities of meaning from what we see.
Espacios ( Spaces) is a very personal series related to two events that turned the quiet practice of photography into an alternative way of life: moving to a city like Havana and being diagnosed with otosclerosis, with no immediate solution. I began to observe the city with the detachment and expectation (or estrangement) of someone who does not belong to it. The gradual loss of my hearing led me into a certain degree of social isolation, and my perception became increasingly dependent on the visual. The photographs emerged from moments of introspection, from long walks through the city, with no other intention than to escape the anxiety that stillness caused me. Through that exercise, I began to identify certain spaces as possible stages. I sense that something subtle is happening in them, or is about to happen. Then I stop. With my eye fixed on the viewfinder of my camera, I wait. I am interested in allowing the scene to reveal itself on its own; that is why I return to these spaces by day and by night, at different moments, until I find the atmosphere, the right character, the cars, the reflections, the gaze that, without editing, reveal the scene. Once the work had accumulated, Espacios was born, a series of photographs I have been developing since 2019 in Havana, Cuba. Ultimately, it is a way of looking at the contours inhabited by waiting, where I perceive the anticipation and uncertainty latent in the images as a muffled sound. I am never entirely sure whether that sound comes from the surroundings, from a decaying city suspended in another time, or from within ourselves. About this first solo exhibition—October/November 2021, in the entrance hall of the CRAI at the University of Alcalá, Madrid—Direlia Lazo wrote: “At times, the images inhabit that ‘non-place,’ generating the sensation of reversible space: did it happen before or after? Did we live it or dream it? Repetition, returning to the space, inhabiting it for a second and third time, uncovers the skin of the unsayable, what remains in the imaginary of reiteration, and suddenly someone mentions: ‘it is Havana,’ and the loops, the stories contained within, expand.”
