inkjet printing on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Metallic
various sizes
The average patient - myself included - however hard they try, can’t read this photograph, which has to be passed on to the radiologist in order to conclude a diagnosis. The misunderstood image of their own body ends up becoming an object of enchantment. Who hasn’t asked to keep an X-ray? But there are also cases in which these images are lost. In the beginning of 2023, I found dozens of CT and MRI scans scattered around Humaitá street. All the scans had in common was the location and the year they were taken: Botafogo, 2020. Who do these fragments of bodies, carelessly discarded in the street, belong to? The answer is written in small letters in the top corner of each print, where you can find a name, gender and age. In the hope of returning these images, I begin a small search based on these three pieces of information. I mainly come across legal pages and LinkedIn profiles; this data doesn’t lead me to a physical person, but to a legal person.Unlike daily photography, where time usually adds value to the image, here it has made them prescriptive. I understand that the only link these images have with their owners is the information written in the top corner. The act of erasing the writing on these images, which were at first so intimate, means that they lose the reason for their existence and become, due to their inability to be read and their physical unrecognition, completely irrelevant to their subjects.The intervention then aims to distort this reading and consequently give another meaning to one that is no longer relevant. The figures mix and move apart, categorizing themselves between black and white in a purely visual way. In the center of the images, now in upper case, the professional identification of each person.