Little History of Photography II

After inheriting the photographic archive of his maternal grandfather,  J.R. Plaza, in 2000, Iñaki Bonillas decided to use part of the material (30 black folders of family photos which Plaza organized in strict chronological order) for a site-specific intervention. Pequeña historia de la fotografía I involved surreptitiously placing the albums into the library at Galerie Greta Meert, the first act in bringing something that had been destined for internal consumption for more than a century into the public domain.

It would not however be until his second effort that the artist entered (literally) into the material. Pequeña historia de la fotografía II can be considered the first of the many passages and viewpoints that Iñaki Bonillas would create in relation to this family legacy, brought together by his grandfather, a self-taught photographer born in Spain and displaced to Mexico, for whom the image was something more than the innocent registry of the details of daily life. As an obsessive editor of his own photographic memory, Plaza seems to have done everything possible to ensure that his iconographic and documentary archive might be turned into the raw material for a later revision. This is how Bonillas comes to take on this illustrated autobiography, and consequently obtained, as he came to understand the distinct orders and layers it encompassed, a greater consciousness of the photographic image’s multiple valences.

From the images taken, compiled and annotated by his forebear (as well as their media, flip-sides, and associated writings), Bonillas, an artist who does not claim to be a photographer, but thorough in the use of his multidisciplinary resources, linked a series of proposals in which photography ceased to be the memory of a fait accompli in order to open it up, instead, to the vitality of phenomenological doubts.

In  J.R. Plaza’s albums Bonillas has found, among other accounts, the brief history of photography here present. A large open chest where every instant registered by the family camera is illuminated by the artist, making it possible, after having grouped the photos together as an indistinct whole, to conjure up an unequivocal sense of meticulously accumulated time. More than a refuge where certain images can hibernate or go into hiding, the archive here becomes a promise and a “responsibility for tomorrow”, as Jacques Derrida would say. So to know what the archive really conceals, it is necessary to dig into it, to find one’s own way through it. This is precisely what Iñaki Bonillas begins to do here.