All the Vertical Photographs of the J.R. Plaza Archive, Photographically Documented (All the Verticals)

Three points of entry are suggested by the descriptive name of this work. First, Bonillas submitted the  J.R. Plaza albums to an apparently impersonal selection. He chose only the vertical pictures (990 in all), in the knowledge that the majority of images from family albums (and indeed the majority of twentieth century photographs) are horizontal. The logical result is that the majority are portraits of individuals or couples, instead of being remembrances of scenes and events, with their resultant allegorical value.

Second, the artist decided to show this bank of images following the progressive inclusion of the photographs in the albums. An order essentially chronological that makes a linear reading of the installation inevitable, as if it were a modern frieze, illustrating the history of a family of Basque origins in the 1930s that had immigrated to Mexico after the fall of the Spanish republic. The selection includes images that range from the end of the nineteenth century to the late 1990s, in this way including the photographs Plaza had inherited from his parents, as well as his own production.

Finally, Bonillas chose to re-photograph the images, so as to give them a homogenous treatment. In this way he gave the overall body of work an apparent unity of size and proportion, which enables him to eliminate variables that were there for reasons of materials, formats and framings, all factors that could further stratify the images beyond the question of time.

By means of this final neutralizing gesture, the artist contradicts the strong narrative accent of the installation, thus devising an alternative reading as a result. It is here where images are brought together not on the basis of a family genealogy, but, as Henri Focillon would say, of “secret ties that are constantly beyond times and places.” In this sense, Bonillas’ photographic process begins, strictly speaking, after the shutter has been activated, and in this way photography, as it is represented in the archive, becomes the initial investigation, the sketch of an image.