Between the 4th and the 6th of November we took part in a workshop organized by Fotomata and conducted by a Guatemalan photographer Luis Gonzalez Palma, nevertheless we did not mention it here, as it seemed  it would have been impossible to transmit, even get close to, the extraordinary sensations we went through these days spent together. Last Saturday, by coincidence, we came across this photograph by Luís on the cover of a cultural supplement Babelia and we cannot avoid a small review of his work anymore.

Fernando and I were impressed by his work in 1999, when we had the opportunity to meet Luís at the festival Photoespaña, and we have followed his evolution eversince, with the intrest one follows an author admired for his images, his poethic way of looking and for his ability to evoke memories. We highly recommend an unhurried look at his website to enjoy his work and the talent visible in every project; a subtle evolution in diverse themes, a never hidden seduction by the memory and the nostalgy for his own social imaginary.

Sharing a few days with him was definitelly enriching, both for the oportunity to get to kow his projects in depth together with the approach applied, and for the priceless analysis of our own work. Realized with an extraordinary precision, the analysis offers a new point of view, always suggestive, that made us face questions and doubts that will empower our future developement. His personality and the way he conducted the workshop created an atmosphere for participation, gentle and judicious, that allowed us enjoy independently our lines of work.

As a part of the workshop, Fernando presented a series of images that are being prepared for an exhibition in 2012 that will take place in the gallery The Fotómata. They are images of architectural spaces during their construction stage, with the aim of showing and making tangible the transitory, almost virtual space, that will not exist beyond the execution time. It´s something more than an effort to register, document the time between a spacial idea – the project – and its material form, since it searches for and saves highly evocative images destined to be forgotten, lost within the completed work. According to Luis´s interpretation, it´s an opportunity to “inhabit these scaffoldings, which are the invisible sceleton of a completed work. Memory hidden in every building, and in every person”.

GC