Iñaki Bonillas: Christmas Memories Photography as an essential rite of the family in modernity
For years, Iñaki Bonillas has been working with the archives of his maternal grandfather and amateur photographer, José María Rodríguez Plaza, who was exiled in Mexico when he was twenty years old. In one of the albums in this archive he found a photographic portrait of his great-grandmother Pilar in 1982. The picture indicated that this was copy number two of five. Bonillas decided to trace the fate of the four remaining copies, pursuing the various lives of the same image on the understanding that, in photography, the reality of the negative is always spectral. The artist documents the place where the copies of the portrait of his great-grandmother Pilar are now and puts them next to portraits of other members of the family in an intergenerational dialogue outside of time.
