TRADITIONAL TRAVELING TRADES INTO EXTINCTION

This work is the result of a researching project financed with a grant awarded in 2004 by the Simon Gugghenheim Foundation. It consists of 14 daguerreotypes (9 cm x 12 cm), assembled on a wood artefact with its own lighting. Trades that are being extinguished for different reasons (new technologies, new marketing ways and knowledge’s loss of traditional tools) have been portrayed. Some of the portrayed people are the last representatives of their trades such as the milkman or the park photographer. These are examples of trades that have been very common in the past and today, as the demand have decreased, they are disappearing.
Why do I choose these portraits? Are they the answer of my own disappearance? Is the use of the daguerreotype as a supporting image a symbol of the fight of an almost extinct photographic tradition in the digital photography area? It is important to say that in any way is not a clash of new technologies but the acceptance of them. It is an historic process to be added to new photographic expressions. Each of these portraits shows a man with its almost unknown technique and focus on an almost disappeared market. Each daguerreotype is unique. It is not possible to make copies as when you have a negative or a digital support.
Every image shows a man with his tool not as a cold record of an event but to show a man alive and proud of his job. Even though he is not aware of the importance of it, we do. They have the pressure to survive and they do not think of how many of them there are and I have the need to be part of their space and time.
My intention when I did this work was not interfere in their lives but to live and to give expression to the passage of time, their frustration, efforts to survive and energy transmitted.