Magaly Ugarte

The distinction between the camera and the mobile device is not, here, a matter of technological fetishism or analog nostalgia, but a conceptual operation. By separating the photographic act from the multifunctional apparatus —that cognitive prosthesis that captures, processes, and distributes everything— one recovers what we might call the dignity of single purpose. The dedicated camera establishes a different pact with the world: it does not record in order to accumulate, but to sustain a gaze.

These photographs function as an affective archive: presences that briefly inhabited a place, objects belonging to others, moments that surfaced in the midst of pain. They are fragments of an intimate documentation that rejects the logic of automatic backup. Here, each image is a decision, a deliberate act of preservation in which spontaneity does not oppose consciousness, but becomes its very condition.

What binds these images is neither a style nor a formal strategy, but an ethical gesture: the attempt to pull from today’s continuous visual flow certain moments that deserve to remain. As Susan Sontag observed, to photograph is an effort to collect the world. Yet in the current context, where we are all involuntary curators of infinite archives, collecting also implies a politics of selective forgetting.

This exhibition invites us to consider what it might mean to look again instead of merely processing. To ask whether it is still possible, amid visual saturation, to sustain a living dialogue with what we photograph. To recognize that some images do not seek circulation, but endurance; they do not aspire to total visibility, but to exist as discreet presences that carry themselves through time.

Can photography, today, still be an act of presence?

— Anent Gallery