Lost Love Stories
(Found photographs, 2010)
My grandparents got married in 1925 and she died 9 years later, in consequence of the birth of their 6th child. The remains of their wedding are nothing more than some fine-printed invitation cards plus a faded studio photograph composed from a poor viewpoint. Those times did not know yet the flashlight and taking photographs using the available light of the church was not a common practice so far.
One generation later, when my mother got married in the little chapel of my grandfather’s house, there weren’t any pictures taken of her nuptials. My parents have lived a powerful love story before his death 11 years after their wedding. Their photographs together are rare, despite the fact that he was for while an amateur photographer who took quite a bunch of pictures of my brother and me.
The family of my mother keeps a one-century rather rich photographic collection for the standards of the region and the times but it lacks documentation of the family’s romantic relationships. During my childhood, my mother told us countless times the tragic end of her parents’ marriage. As an adult, I realized there are very few pictures of their incredible love story, which I got to witness by reading their passionate letters.
This work intends to give the anonymous romances a memoir. It’s departure point is a series of photographs of unidentified couples found in different places such as markets, drawers, albums, card boxes and even on the streets around Holland and Brazil. Using new pictures assembled with the found ones, the work creates a possible memory for those faded love stories, which images were abandoned motivated by the end of the relationship, by death or for some kind of embarrassment.
The series is about relationships that have been poorly registered and then interrupted, broken and lost (I have lived and lost track of my own broken stories too). It is meant to paying homage to the encounter and separation of two people motivated by love, passion, death, fear and countless life events.