1st JOANA P. CARDOZO
A mute piano, drums scattered across the music room, eight hats cluttered in the tiny bedroom, high-heeled shoes in the closet, colorful John Lennon-style glasses, dead, faded flowers still distilling sweet perfume, toys struggling against each other in the Basement, crucifixes, candles in
the shape of fruits, smoke, incense, laces and saints. "Blueprints" gravitate around the idea that our home is our reflection. Instead of conventional photographic portraits, in this work, I reveal the personality of the person I photographed, using the contents of their houses. "Blueprints" may resemble architectural plans, however, they are in fact an unusual form of portraits. As a mirror, the house reflects the identity of its residents. I enter and see the reflection of the host and also a fragment of myself. Every object that I find in the house of a pictured person, later placed between the dividing lines of my "Blueprints", offers a hint about the personality and character of the person portrayed there. The way in which the content of the house is organized reveals to me, in a whisper, whether the person is organized, chaotic, romantic, divorced; everything I imagine to know. With my camera, I write in a single page the biography of my portraited. I come in. I choose objects. I remove the object from its place. I place the object in
front of a light source. I create a shadow, my new object. I photograph such creation. I put the object back in its place. The shadow vanishes. It is now a photo. The choice of a specific item is my way of illustrating aspects of the life of the person portrayed at my pleasure. I expose to the viewer my perception of the person portrayed. Such exposure is neither precise nor translucent, but nebulous, difficult to interpret, such as portraits. Diane Arbus once would have said, "Seeing the contents of a certain person's bathroom is like reading its bio." "Blueprints" does not portray faces, hands, or appearances-they are the reflection of every person. They are the reversed projection, the negative of the original. It is, in fact, like reading a biography, but from the outside to inside.
