Cibachromes

The Cibacromos series is comprised of a group of images belonging to a section of the  J.R. Plaza Archive related only to slides. It should be recalled that for a long time slides were the most readily available form of color photography for amateur photographers, who otherwise had to settle for traditional black and white pictures. We need also to keep in mind that slides, due to their very nature, need a projector to make them “larger”. In this way, until the 1970s color photography involved a type of “revelatory” ritual that made access to the images a more substantial event than simply looking at pictures. This is why it is even more notable that the slides in the  J.R. Plaza Archive include such a number of “self-portraits” of Plaza, who loved photography just as much as he cared about movies. The slides (along with Super 8 film) were in this sense the best way to draw closer to the cinematographic image, though on a domestic scale — and in full color! There is no doubt this is what Plaza had in mind, since the images have the particularity to be variations on a single theme: Plaza himself (here repeating takes and posing consciously for the camera).

Behind the efforts by Plaza (as a performer and as a photographer), we sense the patient action of reconstitution that Bonillas plays out from the relative anonymity of his neo-conceptual presentation strategies. It is he, after all, who makes the connection between each pair of images, and who furthermore recomposes the image of his grandfather as a possible fictional character that comes and goes in front of us. Each image here has its opposite, its B-side as it were. There is a minimal variation in the action that refers to the capacity of photography to capture the instant, only that here the instant is performed, orchestrated with great precision.

For this series the artist decided to work directly from the slides so as to produce the images we see. Originally, slides were meant to be used also for printing, a function that was eventually displaced over time by color prints from a negative. Cibachrome is precisely the original process through which one goes from positive to positive. This process has almost been extinguished in our day, though the artist uses it here to attain this particularly intense and bright coloration.