Iñaki Bonillas: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

Projecte SD, Barcelona

Photography just hasn’t been the same since Roland Barthes’ mother died, has it? For those who didn’t study art, photography, or otherwise come across his book Camera Lucida, her death prompted the French theorist/ philosopher/ critic/ semiotician to write his sometimes touching and grief-stricken musings on, very briefly summarized, the essence of photography, the photograph as an object that is both cultural and personal in meaning, and to quote Barthes directly, “that rather terrible thing which there is in every photograph: the return of the dead.” With the book having basically reached the status of required reading at art schools, it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s influence is marking the work a generation of artists whose work even comes close to the issue of the meaning of a photograph.

With the work of Iñaki Bonillas, Barthes’ influence, while noted, is only one layer of a thoughtful and personal investigation into the nature of the photographic image. The artist has been working with his grandfather’s photographic archive since 2003 to merge the personal and the biographical with the theoretical, and with haunting results. His new exhibition Ghost Stories of an Antiquary contains studies on the (non)presence of the image and it’s spectral nature. In the first, Los ojos (The Eyes) (above), the idea of the negative as the true ghost of photography is explored through portraits taken with the subject’s eyes closed, reflecting the old concern that the eyes in a photograph made the people portrayed actually alive and able to see. Tineidaen (top), the Latin term given to the family of clothes moths, investigates the common fragility of the photography and human memory. The photographs were subjected to insects that ate away at the images, creating unique objects out of the prints while exposing the temporality of the image and object.

Bonillas’ ghost stories are more beautiful than frightening, but if you’re looking for a real scare, there’s always Barcelona Ghost Tours. They meet at Plaza Real every night at 21:00, just a 30 minute walk from the not at all scary Hotel Omm

September 16 – November 05, 2010 at Projecte SD, Passatge Mercader 8, Baixos 1, 08008 Barcelona. Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 7pm.

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Categories: Barcelona, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Contributing writer: Melissa Frost