EXPOSURES
In addition to the loose slides in the box, Vaschetti also found sets of slides
that were packaged together with rubber bands, some labeled with small pieces
of paper, and little tin film canisters. She also found
pieces of paper that had been wrapped around sets of
slides but were now loose.
Rather than looking through the packages she left
them intact and photographed them on black seam-
less. She liked wondering why they were grouped
together and what meaning was hidden in them. “I
understood that there were many things that were
not told,” she says, not only in each image, but also
between images.
While she worked on her project, Vaschetti also
thought about the number of images people are
making and potentially leaving behind for future gen-
erations, and how people today will be remembered
through those images.
“History is what we agree happened,” Vaschetti
explains. “Memory is this organic thing—we think
it was one way, we experience something together
and after a few years you feel differently than I do.
And silences are all those things that we don’t know
and that we don’t want to talk about and that stay in
silence.” There are too few silences today in an over-
photographed world, Vaschetti says. “It’s very complicated for future generations.
We want to be remembered, we want to be somebody in this world, and we leave so
much of [the] little things” that are insignificant.
“I am more interested in the things we don’t know,” she adds. “If I would see this
book in a book shop, I would remember that there was something that I couldn’t
access more than the images themselves.”
The still-life photographs of film cannisters and bundles of slides in
Vaschetti’s book hint at hidden meaning in the photographs.
She decided to re-photograph the slides on a light
table using a macro lens. Vaschetti’s re-photographed
images are mostly out of focus, which visualizes the
act of deciphering and interpreting memories. Her
method allowed her to play with depth of field and
adjust the focus of the images to emphasize certain
details, altering their meaning based on what she
knew of the family or saw in the photographs, making
the memories hers.
There are images from car trips and beaches, and
home and hotel interiors. In one photograph a woman
stands at a scenic overlook against the backdrop of a
jagged, white-capped mountain range. In another she
holds a small dog up over her head. Two women and
a man pause midway up a staircase leading onto a
cruise ship. Vacationers play in the surf while a little
girl looks on. A woman in a checked skirt and black
blouse lies in an unmade bed, smoking a cigarette. A
man looks out over a city from a balcony.
© Lorena Gui LLén Vaschetti
Vaschetti initially wanted to create the book as a
box with loose photographs, so the reader could arrange and interpret them, but for practical reasons
had to sequence them for a more traditional book. The narrative she built begins
with a trip—all of the photographs are outdoors, there is a youthful sense of adventure—and then the images move inside, into bedrooms and other intimate spaces.
The people in the photographs feel older, more mature, perhaps world weary.
C
M
Y
CM
MY
CY
CMY
K
