IN BETWEEN
"My name is Elo and I'm 31 years old. I studied English at university, but I've been taking photos for as long I can remember. I started out with my granddad's camera, moved on to my dad's SLR, and later used a 2.1 megapixel Canon PowerShot..."
Elo Vázquez is a self-taught photographer whose debut in photography was not guided by the lessons imparted at any school or fine art faculty. Around 2002, the artist began to post her first images on a site called Livejournal, a forerunner of the current blogging craze, where users unreservedly shared images of their daily lives. More than documents of a life, in the sense of recording a personal history, the images that Elo Vázquez captured with her analogue camera in those days had to do with building a sentimental archive, a collection of snapshots which, like the puzzles that frequently appear in her pictures, come together to construct a kind of shared self-portrait.
For more than ten years, Elo published her photographs online, sharing experiences with other photographers and people from across the globe in creative communities, publishing in a number of printed media and participating in solo and group shows.
For the INICIARTE programme, Elo Vázquez has chosen to present IN BETWEEN, a project consisting of various digital images taken between 2011 and 2015: four large-format works that illustrate her particular visual approach to reality, based on ordinary chance encounters, and forty images selected from the vast archive she has compiled over the years. These images are displayed at their actual size, which raises questions about the value of images in our current capitalist context—an issue that Elo boldly addresses with her refusal to "adulterate" the nature of these images by enlarging them, as if printing photographs in large formats somehow made them more "exhibition-worthy". All of these tiny photos taken with a mobile phone warn us of their limited shelf life, of the fact that they are ghosts of a reality on the verge of disappearing, and as such they require the active involvement of the user—no longer a mere spectator—of contemporary cultural productions.
The exhibition catalogue features an essay by Jesús Alcaide entitled "Open Journal (Life, Image and Everything Else)".
GAlLERY
TAGS
Utrera (Sevilla), 1983
Elo is a self-taught photographer with a BA in English Language and Literature. In 2002, with the democratisation of the internet, she began publishing her photography on different digital platforms and joined an international group of photographers who timidly shared their first works online. This community gave rise to Fjord, a project curated by Grant Willing and Alana Celii that assembled the photographic work of this group on a website and eventually led to the publication of a book and an exhibition in New York in 2008. Unfortunately, the community disbanded as the internet became increasingly saturated with the work of amateur photographers, but it was undoubtedly an important springboard for the majority of its members.
For years Elo Vázquez has cultivated relationships with artists round the world, and as a result her photographs have appeared in international publications like Frankie Magazine in Australia, Elle Girl in South Korea and Aparta-mento magazine out of Barcelona. Her work has also been featured in major online media such as Feature Shoot and Booooooom.com. In addition to publications, her photos have been included in group and solo exhibitions at venues like Little Mountain Gallery (Vancouver), Above Second Gallery (Hong Kong), Photokina (Cologne) and Iceland. Her most recent one-woman show, Behind, was held at Ljósmyndasafn Reykjavíkur, the Reykjavik Museum of Photography.
She combines her work as a professional photographer with several other activities: teaching Spanish as a second language, working with the band I am Dive and developing an experimental music project with Esteban Bove.
