Artists / Artistas
develop the Agua series. In these works, and later in the series Interiores, the artist began to develop the transcendence of the documentary and of the eminently photographic, which reached its most refined results in Amarrados. The mentioned series not only mark the beginning of his intervention in the darkroom and post-production processes, with the aim of obtaining the images between the extremes of light and shadows that characterize his work, but also of his privileging the spiritual over the documentary in his recordings, thus transcending forms to reach their meaning, which he always associated to the origin or to memory. The artist’s entire photographic process reveals a masterful control of the craft, and also that editing was one of his most outstanding skills. Amarrados is the series that best attests to this. For this reason, the exhibition devoted to these works at the Americas Society included, in addition to the photographs, an important selection of studies that showed the processes for the construction of the image on which Fernell Franco based expressive drama. They illustrated the way in which, through multiple edition proofs, the artist generated new focuses after the capture, as well as the procedures through which he altered the scene via trimmings, re-compositions, contrasts or interventions, in order to empower a given body. Some of the studies were selected with the exclusive purpose of demonstrating his predilection and passion for black and white, a contrast which he considered to be representative of what was real and genuine in life, for which reason − as these exercises were meant to clarify − color was for the artist just another experiment that allowed him to delve into black and white from a complex angle. In that light and shadow resides, ultimately, Fernell Franco’s most essential search: life and death, as well as their mutual interdependence, which explains why his entire oeuvre is based mainly on memory. In this respect, I insist on the relationship between Amarrados and Pedro Páramo. Featuring different approaches in both works, the key issue is memory, and memory reveals itself through the living voice of the dead. They speak, motivated by what remains of them among the living. This guideline may be detected in the areas in which the signification of oblivion vibrates in each particle. In Pedro Páramo, that place is represented by the city of Comala, which the active world (the world of the living) has left aside and in an indifferent distance, while the development of new markets and production centers has taken place amidst the contradictions between Mexico’s history and its modernity. In Amarrados, that space for isolation and reflection on memory is found in the street markets of many Latin American cities, which incorporate to the solid structure of their buildings other mobile and mutating ones: those that the most socially disadvantaged construct with everyday resources for their daily urgences. Consequently, these recordings could best be obtained in the late afternoon or just before dawn, when those engaged in informal trade activities are getting ready for the day’s work or after the crowds have left. Thus, in that remote and shadowy silence, a ghostlike night and a ghostlike city, in which the meaning of what is being observed lies at the depth, are highlighted, just as in the case of Comala city. The voices that emerge therefrom do not belong to the world of appearances or of surfaces. The sounds
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