| Archive Project 18: Christina Fernadez |
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Christina Fernandez's Essay |
Images from the Exhibition Chirstina Fernandez Home Page Archive - Spring 2003 Home |
The Project Series
Project 18: Christina Fernandez
Artist Statement
Lavanderia started as a series of photographs of storefronts along César Chávez Boulevard and other main streets in East Los Angeles. I have always been interested in how the urban landscape speaks through the bits and pieces we leave behind in our day-to-day lives and through other agents of the neighborhood, their graffiti tag names emblazoned on walls and windows of buildings.
Buildings tell of the people who inhabit them and the social context in which they exist. In many ways they are a stage for the daily dramas of life—the mundane, the tragic, the ordinary. Buildings simultaneously conceal and reveal the labor within, the subject of my former work Manuela S-t-i-t-c-h-e-d. A series of eight photographs of sweatshop buildings in East Los Angeles, Manuela S-t-i-t-c-h-e-d was part of an installation that combined the images with text created from the narratives of women who had worked in garment factories.
Photographers have long been interested in labor, from Daguerre’s blurred shoeshine boy in his untitled 1839 photograph of Rue du Temple, to Lewis Hine’s documentation from 1908-1918 of underage workers in factories and mills for the National Child Labor Committee, to Dorothea Lange’s photographs illustrating the harsh Depression realities of rural America for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration, among others. In these instances, labor was clearly defined as the backbreaking work of the fields, factories, and docks.
The blur of labor, the anonymity of the laborer, the stillness of leisure—Lavanderia is a further investigation of these as well as something entirely new to my work: capturing the movement of people and the artificial light of night through photography. The painter Edward Hopper portrayed the strange light emanating from buildings at night and the emblematic lone figure waiting or contemplating. Hopper’s focus on the mundane details and the psychological tensions of everyday life is echoed in this new body of work.
The men, women, and children pictured in Lavanderia are subjected to the watchful eye of the photographer. The blur of their domestic labor—folding and sorting of clothes, controlling and keeping entertained the bored child—is transplanted to the public realm. The handprints of youngsters on windows illuminated by fluorescent lights are evidence that the washing of clothes is a family event. The etched and graffiti-marked windows are an obstacle to my perfect view. The short depth of field (the shallow range of focus due to a wide-open aperture) further obscures the sometimes lone figures, reinforcing their anonymity.
Lavanderia is rich with binaries—working and waiting, the beautiful but oppressive graffiti, obscured views through windows that are a kind of impenetrable membrane. Although the camera forces engagement between my subjects and myself, as I ask permission to photograph them, Lavanderia is less about connection than about our inability to bridge the spaces between subject and artist.
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