MIAMI — Fifteen selected artists and photographers gathered at the Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) to participate in the 12-day workshop Photo book as object between June 3 and 11, 2023. This workshop also inaugurated WOPHA’s Institute of Photographic Practices, Criticism and Historiography. Taught in different parts of the world since 2014, it was the first time that the workshop took place in the United States and at WOPHA.
Co-facilitated by Tokyo-based freelance photographer and curator Yumi Goto and Lima-based photographer Paola Jiménez Quispe, the workshop sought to uncover what makes the photobook a unique medium. “As a curator, I was frustrated because putting on exhibitions didn’t bring big changes. Not everyone could access these spaces,” said Goto, who held her first workshop in Japan. Hyperallergic. A turning point for her was meeting the Belgian artist Jan Rosseel at a photo festival in Duch, where Rosseel presented a project about his father’s murder in the 1980s in the form of a research book that included recreated footage and eyewitness testimony scenes.
“It wasn’t just a portfolio or a catalog,” Goto recounted. Through the medium of the photobook, Goto saw someone telling a visual story about a social issue. “So I thought that might work,” she said.
“The photobook medium is ideal and provides more democratic access,” said Aldeide Delgado, a Cuban-born, Miami-based art historian and independent curator who founded WOPHA in 2018 to research, promote, support and educate women and non-binary photographers. “What you’re building is a narrative that allows the artist to go back into their personal archives and generate a story that becomes an act of resistance against the stories told to us,” she added. While studying art history at the University of Havana, Delgado asked her professors where the female photographers were. “I was told they didn’t exist, or if they existed, they weren’t good enough.”
In 2013, Delgado launched the Catalog of Cuban Photographs (Catalogue of Cuban Women Photographers), a live digital archive with the aim of giving visibility to these otherwise forgotten artists. “Many of these artists have never had exhibitions in spaces and have had little critical validation,” Delgado said. After immigrating to Miami, she discovered that the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography had an unattributed photograph on their website titled “The Buendia family. Havana(1982); since no one in the United States knew the photographer’s name, the museum called the artist “anonymous”. Delgado, who had spent years cataloging the work of female photographers in Cuba dated of the 19th century, recognized the work by Abigail Garcia Fayat and contacted the museum to share the artist’s name. Fayat is one of many female artists that Delgado rescued from anonymity.
With these conditions that made, and continue to make, erasure possible, Delgado invited Goto to Miami after meeting her in Tokyo in 2022 during a talk at the Goto Gallery, Reminders Bastion of Photography. The purpose of the workshop was to provide the cohort of artists with the support they needed to become authors of their own stories.
On the first day of the workshop, the participants printed their images, displayed them on a wall and took turns talking about their projects. “It doesn’t matter how good the photographs are or how good the pictures are,” Goto said. “What we want to find is history.”
Melissa Guerrero, one of the workshop participants, brought hundreds of photographs from her archives. Her photo book Everyone in Florida has a pool (2023) expresses her frustrations as a Venezuelan immigrant who has seen others take advantage of what she could never afford. “During the [COVID-19] pandemic, we spent a lot of time outside on the terrace. We could never afford a house with a pool, but with an inflatable pool, plants, shells that I collected and still life objects, I created a world for my children,” she said. Hyperallergic. Documenting her disappointment with the promises of the American Dream, Guerrero’s work also tells a story about divorce, the Catholic social stigma that comes with becoming a single mother, and three generations of Venezuelan women in her family who are also divorced.
Another participant, Lisette Morales, came up with an idea for document THE farming community life and struggles in Immokalee, Florida, focusing on workers’ relationship to the land and their demands for better working conditions. Goto advised her to use a first-person perspective to elevate the voices of this community through her own family’s Indigenous history and recipes. “By weaving together the threads of ancient cosmogonic narratives and my own lived experiences, I have tried to create a testimony of resilience,” she said. Hyperallergic. Title Cantos Cosmicos (Cosmic Songs) (2023), the work also became on her. “There’s a layer where we had to own our own narratives,” Morales said.
Morales lost all family albums when Sandinistas turned her street in Managua, Nicaragua into a refugee camp in 1979. Only one photo of her mother survived, which she included in the book. To make up for the lack of family photos, Goto suggested This Moral use native illustrations and recipes from her mother. At times, his research brought moments of irony. In search of illustrations of the creative deities of the Nahuatl cosmovision, she sought the Borgia Codex, one of the few pre-Columbian painted manuscripts kept in the Vatican Library. Due to copyright, Morales had to write to the director of the library and ask their permission to use the image of their own ancestors. “Why are the sacred manuscripts of the indigenous peoples in the Vatican? she wondered aloud. “I see this as cultural colonialism.”
Andrea Sarcos, who explored his family’s story across Ecuador, Venezuela and the United States in Ephemeral, preserved (2023), faced a different challenge. A family album her grandmother kept under her bed was largely destroyed in a flood, leaving only a few faded photos behind. In Sarcos’ Photobook, these surviving photos are woven with words, archival documents and impressions of alternative processes.
Goto’s partner in the project, Jiménez Quipe, started as a participant in one of the workshops in 2018. The end result is Battle Rules (2022), which tells her story of growing up without her father, who was murdered in Peru in 1998.
Maria Martinez-Cañas described her project Identity Denied: Deconstruct Image Object (2023) as a “photobook on a book”. The artist superimposed portraits of herself over images in August Sander’s Persecuted / Persecutors: People of the 20th Century (2018) to ask about gender identity and expression.
Diana Larrea, who immigrated to the United States at age 19 from Peru, wanted to piece together her immigrant experience using family archives and personal images. In I left too soon (2023), she worked with themes such as absence, distance and passing time to explore this narrative. “In these reconnections, I explore a sense of belonging through memories and nostalgia. Trying to figure out why I left,” she said.
On the last night of exposure, the showers finally stopped, bringing back a thick blanket of humidity that I also felt on some evenings in Havana and Buenos Aires. Artists who presented their work spoke of vanishing times and places that are central to themes of immigration and change. But I also saw a dynamic presence operating within a visual culture where the stories of marginalized groups are still absent. When I looked at the photo books, I saw people claiming that presence and, in a vivid and intimate way, fighting back.
“And the cover of the book? What will it look like? the artists began to ask as the end of the workshop approached. “Don’t worry,” Goto repeated, “the cover will reveal itself.”
