Revelados

The act of sitting for a portrait is an exercise in anticipated nostalgia. For 70 years, Limean people attended Eugenio Courret’s Fotografía Central photography studio to be portrayed. People posed with a longing that combined the construction of their identity with the fight against the passing of time. The studio’s art nouveau façade survives in a place that now tends to ignore it. The dynamics of the urban space around the studio have changed completely: it respond now to a recent history of population explosion and migration. With this project –an intervention of the public space surrounding the studio with life-size reproductions of characters portrayed by Courret– I seek to close the gap that time has created between the thousands of personal stories captured in Courret’s photographs and the Lima of today. The gesture of momentarily reviving those people is equivalent to organizing a protest march against oblivion.