In the summer of 2016, Susan Dobson came across a slide library that was being de-accessioned due to the emergence of digital archives. She became interested in the labelling and classification of the slides in the collection, which had not been updated or maintained in a long time, as they highlighted changes to our political, cultural, social, and geographic awareness. The collection also revealed an emphasis on Western art historical content. For example, a single Western country was represented by more than fifty trays, while up to eight nonWestern countries shared a single tray. The photographs that Dobson subsequently made question the ability of any archive to fully do justice to its subject, especially over time.

The aging of the slides, as physical resource, is a poignant reminder of philosopher Roland Barthes’ melancholy musing on the photograph,in which he points out that the photograph, like a human being, has a limited life: “Like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grain, it flourishes a moment, then ages.… Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away.”1

1 Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida. Nueva York: Hill and Wang.

“El ser entreabierto” (2016) is a series of photographs suggested after reading The Poetics of Space (1957) by Gaston Bachelard, a book in which the author reflects on the house from a psychological viewpoint, understanding it as a topography of our being and as an instrument to analyse the human being and his relationship with the world. Therefore,he argues, we should not talk of the house as an object, but as a being. The specular relationship between human body and soul and architecture was the starting point for this project, based around a play of parallels and projections between spaces and people, in which both sides are represented as structures housing an inner space, accessible only through closing and opening mechanisms, contemplating the possibility for those structures to be an isolated block or frame, but, as Bachelard said, also a space inhabited by the universe, a mist.

Taking photographs by placing the camera “inside” the images responds to an urge to alter the conventional hierarchy of what supposedly bestows meaning. Instead, it pays attention to what resides in the interstices of the visible and usually goes unnoticed. Focusing our gaze in order to capture the apparently accessory information contained in a photo, what is secondary to the alleged referent, ultimately breaks down the boundary that keeps us on the outside as spectators and brings us inside. From this new space on the sidelines of photography, each one of us can follow our own path and in turn revisit our own images from another perspective, with other closeness.

“La cuarta pared” engages with a desire to explore the physical dimension of the photographic object and to nd answers to questions posed by the sociological mesh woven by family photos. How do these photographs mediate in our relationships? In what way do they intervene in our connections, in our understanding of family bonds? “La cuarta pared” is a work about affect and the mechanisms de ning the subjectivity inherent to our perception of images, inviting the beholder to embark on a journey to the centre of photography.

Apnée is the title of the collection of images inspired by George Sand’s Contes d’une grand-mère (A Grandmother’s Tales), and by the collection of legends, (Légendes rustiques) written by her son, Maurice. Each of these photographs explores variability but also the question of alteration and change, the transition from one state to another: images which are different but with an underlying resemblance. Variations on a theme, a change of tone or of harmonies around the same melodic line, a soft, insistent music lingering in the memory. Images which evoke others, hovering, suspended in time. Images which escape and create a passage through which Frey can reach out to the other, move from here to there and here to Elsewhere. For her, photographs are like the words of a poem, a tale or a novel: words like meditation and silence… When you come to the end, if there is an end, only the resonance and the emotion remain.