The closed treasure room and the intention of Alberto García-Alix

Susan Sontag wrote somewhere that the photographs express the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction. To which we should add that this becomes evident in the portraits made by Alberto García-Alix.

Because there is a moment when the eyes of the portrayed character peek out to tell us something that is not fully said, our own gaze being in charge of completing it. It is just one impression of the many that Alberto García-Alix’s photographs provoke, whether they are portraits or stolen moments that come to affirm themselves as an extension of human consciousness.

In order to reach Alberto García-Alix, one must gain sufficient momentum and go back to China in the 5th century BC, where the philosopher Mozi experimented with the first “closed treasure room” in a dark room in which he had made a small hole — pinhole. — on one of its walls. Through this hole, and on the wall opposite the pinhole, the inverted image of the outside world was projected. From here, the photons of the quantum world will mark a line of light through history where science, read Kepler, or art, read Velázquez, will use the treasure of the camera obscura to project their advances.

Without going any further, in 1607, Kepler discovered a sunspot with the help of the camera obscura, although, at first, he thought it was the planet Mercury. On the contrary, in 1631, the priest and astronomer Pierre Gassendi, using a camera obscura like Kepler, discovered the shadow of the planet Mercury, although, at first, he thought it was a sunspot.

Following the course of art history, Velázquez is closer to Alberto García-Alix and his project entitled Fantasies in the Prado; a work where the photographer melts different works from the art gallery to reveal new meanings to the resulting image. There are those who say that Velázquez, for his famous painting Las Meninas, would have used the camera obscura, thus achieving perspective on the canvas from the projection of another smaller painting. In this way, the precision in the stroke would be explained.

We could say that Velázquez used the “closed treasure room”, in the same way that Alberto García-Alix uses the phantom print that allows development when mixing one image with another. The result is never static, but flows before our eyes until playing with the illusion. What Alberto García-Alix achieves is to take us to the phantom figures, those that do not appear in that primitive image taken by Louis Daguerre, that of El boulevard du Temple, dated 1838.

Susan Sontag says, regarding this image taken by Daguerre, that this is where “the inventory begins”, as it is the first photo where the human figure appears. “Since then almost everything has been photographed, or so it seems.” The only human beings that appear in Daguerre’s image are very small, in a corner, and you have to strain your eyes to appreciate their figures that are shown as if they were statues. It is about a man polishing another man’s shoes. They are the only people who appear in the photo, since the exposure time to impress the image —about 10 minutes— did not allow the other people who were passing through that street to be fixed.

Their very movement turned them into invisible men and women for the long adventure of an invention that, following the Arthurian legend, plays with the light projected through a hole opened in the shadows by a unicorn’s horn. Then there is Alberto García-Alix, who uses this magic to express the vulnerability of the lives that he portrays against a background that becomes the reality of the world.

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