ENTRY DESCRIPTION
Trying to arrange my photographs to evoke my experience of travelling to places very far away from each other, I found myself confronted with an inevitable fact: images would elicit very different sets of emotions or bring up different meanings according to the other photographs that accompanied them.
What drew my attention when making such associations among my pictures were the visual links that emerged between pairs of photographs. These bonds normally connected a place or a detail to a person.
These connections allowed me to link images that were apparently unrelated while evoking what I felt could best express the displacement and attempt at reconnection I experience while travelling. Elements very far away from each other were finally associated in each pair of photographs and in doing so they resulted in a very authentic rendition of my experience of travelling to and trying to understand disparate places very distant from each other.
These links are neither narrative nor logical: I decided to make associations that were purely visual but that could evoke a link on a deeper, almost unconscious level. By pairing two images unrelated by context, the meaning of the single photo is put into question and new associations, new meanings are allowed to emerge.
It is a play, a game of association and meaning that follows a visual lead and is ever so elusive, but also inevitable if, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty points out, "because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning".
AUTHOR
Sandra Cattaneo Adorno took up photography in 2013 at the age of 60 and has since gone on to garner extensive recognition for her work. The author of The Other Half of the Sky and Águas de Ouro (Radius Books, 2019 and 2020) Cattaneo Adorno’s work was recently published in Gulnara Samoilova’s landmark book Women Street Photographers (Prestel 2021) and Portrait of Humanity (Hoxton Mini Press, 2019). Cattaneo Adorno received the 2021 and 2020 Julia Margaret Cameron Award, the 2020 International Photography Award, the 2019 Portrait of Humanity Award in collaboration with Magnum Photos, and was a 2019 National Geographic finalist. She has exhibited work at Somerset House, London; Photoville, Brooklyn; Miami Street Photography Festival; Italian Photo Festival, Venice; PX3 Prix de la Photographie de Paris, Paris, and Women Street Photographers Exhibition in Paris, among many others.
back to gallery
