Sylvia Ernestina Vergara

Artist Statement

Photography

(An Experience of Catch and Release)

Photography is a way of taking me into that, which intuitively fascinates. I still use a 35 mm camera. It is unlike a hunter’s trap that captures animals and at times kills them or puts them into captivity. Photography traps or captures a moment. I examine it and then release it back to the universe.

Seeing my first picture is like prying open the trap. What I have caught is a piece of the mysterious, and then I am eluded. On the piece of paper is a message in code of images and places. It asks a question—“Why did you press your finger at that moment?” I will never know, and in a way, it doesn’t really matter. The most important part about the experience is the “dialogue” between that and myself which is intuitively fascinating at the moment. 

Photography is also about how a piece of information will continue to evolve after becoming “a first picture.” The dialogue continues after the moment is gone. The photo and I play tag. In the end—I am captured and released by the photo. The dialogue that took place disappears only for another encounter in another moment. This dialogue is what motivates all my photography and all of my creative process in other mediums. There are many levels of participation—the element of surprise—sometimes dramatic, emotional, other times waiting without anticipation, anticipating observing failing, failing again, stumbling on a jewel of a mistake, treasuring the obvious. Discarding all the and’s, the’s and but’s, until a single simple innocent moment is “desnuda”—naked.

I use the computer in my photographic process. The computer is like a microscope. It allows me to dive into the photo and swim around in its colors, lines and subjects. I like how the photo becomes huge and I become very small like a floating sub-atomic particle in the universe of the photo. Then, like a little photo astronaut janitor, I clean little specks, move things here and there, lighten or darken. Sometimes like the superwoman Zaryna or Tarzan, I use layers of my images to produce an echo of an image like an echo from the jungle.

Through photography, I narrate and tell stories. Some of them are tragic—like the story of the drought and how it was killing my orchard on my farm. Stories of how water is getting scarcer, and water ration papers called “Papelitos” are doled out during desperate times. Some photo narratives with accompanying poems are odes to millions of trees that were murdered by arsonist’s fires. They are reminders of a vulnerable world that we are inextricably a part of.  

Other images are of the “paradise” experience. Moments so beautiful that it is like being kissed and awakened by a beauty so intense and at the same time so gentle and sweet. 

My Flamenco photography is dancing with darkness and light in “duende” images and is often documentary in nature of my family.

Photography self-portraits are intimate experiences between the camera and myself. I want to see myself and I want to see how the camera sees me. I feel that ow I see myself is not how others see me. The self-portrait is getting to know the self through all three persons: the “I,” the “she,” and the “you.”