Angelica Garcia is a photographer and artist from Venezuela. She studied photography in Argentina graduating with a bachelors degree. Since then, her art and photographic works have taken her all over the world and been exhibited in cities such as New York. Garcia is particularly interested in the idea of merging both her art and photography style together creating unique experimental imagery. Lots of her work is focused around the idea of loneliness and carries a deeper meaning.
Vacio translates to emptiness which is what this project is focussed around. To illustrate this feeling Garcia created conceptual portraits by taking portraits of people and then erasing the face to recreate the how this emotion feels, you lose who you are and what you stand for. To erase the face, Garcia printed the images and then manually distorted the face by using her hands to introduce water droplets and blending colours together for example. She then takes a photo of the final image to digitally present them. When she published the images, she released them with this statement to introduce and explain her project in more detail:
“Every day I lose you… time, You are like water that slips away from me. Presence. Moment. Movement. How can I do to show how you run from me? How can I show that even if I freeze you, then you aren’t the same? How if I steal your essence, I don’t have you anyway? Strange presence… Emptiness”
This project allowed her to explore the loneliness she felt as a foreign student in Argentina. It helped her to come to terms with the fact that she could meet a lot of people there, but as soon as they returned to their home countries their presence would dissolve. It also reminded her that through photography she could make moments and persons memorable.
The images as a series look amazing and would be well suited to a large scale gallery installation as they each hold a lot of information about the emotions not only running through Garcia but the people she is photographing. The images were all taken against white walls in the streets of Argentina and therefore all carry a similar, soft natural light. I assume the images were all taken on slightly cloudy days as the light appears quite even across all areas of the images. The clouds act as a large softbox lighting the image. This, in turn, makes the colours much softer giving an overall peaceful aesthetic.
Some of the movement in the images is very consistent and fluid, it looks like just one small movement was used to erase the face. This supports the idea of the images looking peaceful and still as the end result is very soft. These images create more of an idea that the people are more caught in a whirlwind of the mind around one thought or experience. While, in others, the water droplet images, for example, creates a much heavier distortion and is much more sporadic which is much more hectic and intrusive than the rest. These different textures over the images can be seen to express not only the different stages and intensities of emptiness that Garcia felt during her time in Argentina but also the feelings of the people she photographed. As a viewer, this range can help us to relate more closely to the feeling of emptiness as Garcia shows many different scales, no two people are the same.
Overall I think the images are incredibly poetic and sublime. They are beautiful to look at and the movement in the images creates a peaceful and soft expression to the images which lies parallel next to the message behind the images making them much more poetic and heartbreaking. Compositionally, she has kept the subject in the centre of the frame which means that they fill the image and remain the most important factor. I think this has helped to make sure that the people are not forgotten amongst the movement in the images and makes them more powerful as they are easily relatable.
Garcia’s images are incredibly emotionally capturing which makes them so successful. This idea of expressing an emotion in an image to talk about a social issue is what I am aiming to do for my project. By gathering all kinds of people together to take part will show how people are not alone in this feeling and there are many people they can lean on or talk to all around them. Frome this work, I will take away the compositional technique. Placing the subject in the middle of the frame will ensure that the human element is not lost and keep them at the forefront of images highlighting there importance.
https://weandthecolor.com/obscure-portrait-photography-angelica-garcia/33758
https://www.ignant.com/2014/03/28/emptiness-by-angelica-garcia/
Final Major Project 