Ximena Echagüe
Street Photographer without Streets
Street photographers at home, without people in the streets, trying to portray reality in isolation. The new plague has confined all of us indoors, allowing only for introspection, imagination, and symbolism to capture the new fuzzy reality, the invisible risk, the permanent fear. You have too much time to think and wonder. Anxiety ebbs and flows, the past seems blurred, the present doesn't make sense, the future is uncertain. And yet you try to fight, to overcome the paralysis, to reinvent yourself. You start to seek for people at the distance, from windows and terraces, desperately seeking humanity and life in the midst of an empty landscape, like a hunter in search of a prey. Any contact, even at a distance, makes you feel better, less isolated, keeps you sane. Sometimes you imagine the risk through color, red as the virus is often portrayed, invasive, and threatening. The world painted red is not a happy place as it used to but rather an ocean of danger. Nobody and nowhere is safe, you cannot hide from it, even at home. Sometimes you seek protection in reassuring elements, like water, cleaning your body and soul. Water as a symbol of purity. In the same way, as during the old plague, people turned to pray for solace and protection, now you turn to water to feel pure, virginal, untouched by the sad reality. Different ways to struggle, to keep your mind at ease, to overcome anxiety and fear, to continue living and, hopefully, creating.
