Archipelago - Couverture rigide

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 3969002281 ISBN 13 : 9783969002285

Editeur : Kehrer Verlag, 2026

Synopsis

Archipelago presents a photographic meditation on human relationships as a series of emotional islands—separate, fragile, and bound by an invisible geography. Working within the tradition of tableau photography, Yolanda del Amo creates carefully composed, narrative-rich scenes reminiscent of a tableau vivant. Each image is methodically arranged, with precise attention to gesture, color, and spatial relationships.

At once intimate and strikingly distant, each tableau examines contradictions within relationships across countries, generations, and genders, reflecting on how a deep longing for closeness can coexist with an equally strong desire for individuality, and how intimacy is shaped, strained, and ultimately defined by social and psychological distance.

Although Del Amo draws inspiration from real life, working primarily with sitters who are friends or family members, she introduces fictional elements that blur the boundary between reality and artifice. In her images, relationships are inseparable from their environments: domestic interiors, landscapes, and architectural spaces operate as psychological extensions of the figures within them, shaping emotional dynamics and revealing unspoken tensions. The work raises timely questions about class, gender, intimacy, and social connectedness, positioning personal relationships within broader social structures.

From the text Islands in the Sea of Life by Vicki Goldberg:
Then she rearranged people, dictating where they sat or stood as well as their postures and positions. (Having taken many a dance lesson, she was particularly precise about poses, gestures, and carriage.) She told her subjects where to look and what to think about. These people became actors for a mere moment—a moment that will most likely last beyond a lifetime, in a photographic theater set arranged by a photographer who is the playwright, director, and stage manager.

Color plays a central emotional role throughout the series, while an ever-lingering silence emerges as a defining presence. And yet, despite their stillness, the photographs retain a sense of possibility and transformation. As Jean Dykstra observes in her text Alone Together: »As in the theater, roles can change, characters can evolve, silences can be broken, and that prospect is in these photographs, too.«

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

Yolanda del Amo is a Spanish-born, New York-based artist. Trained as a mathematician, she left behind a career in the corporate world to pursue one in the arts. At the core of her practice is a focus on individuals through a sociological, psychological, and anthropological prism. She explores the terrain of human habits, behaviours and desires as well as the relationship of individuals to society, history and culture. Solo exhibitions have been held at the Centro Cultural de la Torriente Brau in Havana, Hudson Franklin Gallery in New York City, and Light Work in Syracuse, New York, among others. Her work has been recently included in group exhibitions at venues such as the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. She has been the recipient of multiple awards, such as a commendation at the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009 organized by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC and the second prize at the Salìn Nacional de Artes Visuales 2005 in Buenos Aires. Institutions and Foundations that have supported her work through production grants include the Fundaciìn Arte y Derecho in Spain, the John Anson Kittredge Fund, the Jerome Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, Spanish Ministry of Culture, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has been a resident artist at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, France, the Spanish Academy in Rome, Light Work in Syracuse, New York, and the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris. She is currently an Associate Professor for Photography and Digital Media at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

Vicki Goldberg (1936–2025) was an American photography critic, author, and photo historian. She wrote extensively on photography and its social history for publications including The New York Times, American Photo, and Vanity Fair, and received numerous awards for her contributions to the field.

Jean Dykstra is a photography critic and former editor of photograph magazine. She has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, Broadcast, and numerous exhibition catalogues and monographs.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Kehrer Verlag
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 3969002281
• ISBN 13: 9783969002285
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 128
• Coordonnées du fabricant: contact@kehrerverlag.com; contact@kehrerverlag.com; ; Mannheimer Straße 175; Heidelberg; 69123; Allemagne