Sueños de la Razon


  • Photographer
    Leonor Baez
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    summer 2013

Time, movement and different scenes, help me to create situations or life experiences, to express emotional states and/or feelings such as loneliness, sadness, despair and others; and the creation of abstract beings that could be named as “inner demons”. Each image is a catharsis, an introspective work, which begins as a need of expression, unconsciously most of the time, ending in a very personal and effective therapeutic exercise. From the black and white subjectivity I approach my desires, my fears, my dreams, this duality between life and death, light and darkness, which inevitably I feel trapped.

Story

“Sueños de la Razón”/ “Dreams of Reason”

“To Wake up tied to a bed, locked in a psychiatric hospital room, made me decide to start my life from the beginning. Once again I had suffered a heroin overdose”.

These are words of Patricia my friend, the time I visited her at the rehab center after her last overdose. Now she lives a recuperation process, a reintegration into society. Her testimony speaks about the illusion to experience a new life where the complexity of routine and to play a functional role into an extremely conservative society, can become stifling.
Following the constant visits to the center, I met some of her roommates which I slowly developed a strong bond. This amazing process produced in me a deeper interest in inquiring about feelings and life experiences of each one of them.
Once, during one of our meetings I made a proposal to create images together. Gradually this proposal was established in a sort of an agreement where each one should be directly involved in its construction. I never imagined experience so deep and ludic complicity with them.

The dynamic was established under the idea that each of them would choose the meeting place once outside the rehab center. From that moment, they should think in a representative phrase to describe the emotional state found after obtaining their freedom and rights again.
“I want to finish this”, “I want peace”, "I´m scared", “I just want to feel”, “Sometimes I want to disappear”,
Phrases would give testimony, of a deeper link between the worlds of addiction and rehabilitation. Phrases that relate the testimony of those who auto define their reality after being detained in a psychiatric hospital.

The images in this series of photographs, represent how have been their experiences of reintegration into a society. I interpret those moments from the possibility to rebuild with images that part of the present and past that tied them and bond us.

From the black and white subjectivity I approach their desires, their fears, their dreams, this duality between life and death, light and darkness, which inevitably feel trapped.

Leonor Baez.
Summer 2013.
Hermosillo. Sonora. México.

You can create multiple entries, and pay for them at the same time.
Just go to your History, and select multiple entries that you would like to pay for.