LEONOR BENITO DE LA LASTRA

Collection 1: \"Cuerpo\" (6), Collection 2: \"Variaciones sobre un tema\" (6), Collection 3: \"Naturaleza no recuperable\" (6).

It’s an analogical black and white photographic work printed on chlorobromide paper. The negatives have been taken by a medium format professional camera, a Bronica 4.5/6 cm. These works have been done between 2016 and 2020, although some of them are previous, recovered and intervened. This selection of pieces takes part of a personal proyection, a conscious autoidentification, with the issue and characters photographied.I mean, I am interested in a reflexive and private means and the investigation of it,the noble processes as well as its plastic manipulation. In this selection of a wider work, two ways of an approach to an issue or a topic coexist, which contradict the issue by itself and exposes ambiguety and undefinition. One way of watching it takes us to delicate, maybe the beautiful, the poetic… Meanwhile the other one refers to strange, unrecognizable, bafflinng… This dichotomy and ambiguity has been related with “Das Unheimliche” by Freud. Both ways do not branch, they work superimposed. In such a way that one, dominates over the other. COLLECTION “CUERPO”: in general, the formal work of the image, where the way of the strange predominates, consist in technical alteration, the visual noise, the chemical accident made in the laboratory, through glaze and superimposition, emerging an inquiring and unsettling image. Deconstructing and transforming body, searching for identity. That will be the case of femenine bodies, from teenager to man… COLLECTION “VARIACIONES SOBRE UN TEMA”: in this case, the alteration is controlled by the poetic and lovely way. But, likewise , the images are polysemic not exempt from some disruption. The childhood transit to the condition of woman status through body fragmentation, highlighted hair, face, figure. The alchemical manipulation or simply plastic, highlights the contradictory situation, the insecure and transitory, the destruction of the time. COLLECTION “NATURALEZA NO RECUPERABLE”: it represents nature memory, the remains which survive to human being abuse and, even though, in spite of everything, they are full of beauty and meanings. I focus on the forgetting, on the silence and desertion, as it was done by the poet Aníbal Núñez, whom I take the headline from. The formal alteration by darkening , swepts, camera shakes or selective blurs removing, collages, ink imprints. Definitely, aggressions.

Photographer

I am titled by the University of Salamanca (Spain) in audiovisual design and video specialty, I have been a profesional photographer for almost 30 years. Aside that I have exposed my work through those years, I directed the photography place called “El Fotógrafo” in Salamanca (Spain) , where the were integrated gallery, specialiced bookshop and studies of old fotographie through some tecnics and its authors.
In 2016 I was selected to expose my portfolio at the “ AGENCIA MAGNUM PHOTOGRAPHY ADWARDS”, in which one of my potos was selected to be at its poster.
https://www.lensculture.com/photo-competitions/magnum-photography-awards-2016/event-submission/182384
In 2019/2020 I exposed part of my work at Domus Artium 2002 in Salamanca (Spain), individual exposition “Poéticas de Interior”.
http://domusartium2002.com/visitasvirtuales/leonor-b-de-la-lastra-2019/

This work belongs to a wider camp of visual discursive exploration through photography, although it
could be considered as a plastic work. Analogical black and white photography is the way I can express
myself.

I want to create a reflexive photography that aspire to create an imaginarium. Its origin came from not
only intelectual, but a plastic experimental concern, that doesn’t reject the track of Human: loneliness,
time through time, loss…

I work in an alchemical way. At the laboratory is where there is an interpretation of a process and a
return to the origins.The use of alchemical components or external to the photographic way that lead to
a disarray, to a dissolution of the shape and creation of another one in a construction-deconstruction
process. Breaking of the defined, the delimited and apprehensible. Shadows, glaze, simulation,
ambiguity… Until it gives an irrecognizable image but also strange.Symbolic. That takes position in the
current time and create meanings.

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