BLURRING THE LINES
BLURRING THE LINES

Raúl Armando Jiménez Jiménez

An exhalation of prevalence

EDITION

2021, Winner

school

School of Photography and Visual Media
Mexico City, México

I fear disappearing. Not from a place of indefinable violence, nor from the memory of those whom I love, but by becoming a casualty of an emptying force that grows within me and my peers. There is an influence that plays a terrible game of prestidigitation inside my flesh; a nonentity that replaces my tissues with undeterminable materials, desperation, and pain. Its nature befits cruelty, against the mind, the meat, the blood, and the soul; it gores all forms of life. Some see this process as a normal transition, an act of vanishing health at the vicinity of inescapable death, but to some of us, those in permanent ache, this weakening of the body is furthermore also a diminishing of existence, as we get relegated to a witnessing seat among other’s lives. At that moment, as if we were participants in a sickening magic trick, we began to disappear and become, socially acceptable, invisible people. Society’s development opened a path to a more conscious and polite civilization, in which modern demands for photography risen the need for a responsible eye, a contextualized documentation, and a non-exploitative approach to subjects. There is, however, an almost imperceptible boundary hidden inside this ethic approximation’s subjectivity; while current audiences had grown desensitized to certain topics, mainly violent, at the same time they are, otherwise, prone to reject themes that produce an uncomfortable reception among the accepted leitmotifs. This upbrings an absence of representation and, given that acknowledgment is a core element for unraveling a problematic, a lack of understanding will result in the nonexistence of actions focused on solving acute issues endured by certain communities. This is called invisibilization. In an ironic and conflicting twist, the kind, modern, sensible, “ethical approach” in photography can and will lead to the disappearing of some of the most uneasy, gross but necessitous, subjects from the spectator’s scene. I made these photographs because they’re me. I refuse to become invisible.

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Raúl Armando Jiménez Jiménez

An exhalation of prevalence

EDITION

2021, Winner

school

School of Photography and Visual Media
Mexico City, México

I fear disappearing. Not from a place of indefinable violence, nor from the memory of those whom I love, but by becoming a casualty of an emptying force that grows within me and my peers. There is an influence that plays a terrible game of prestidigitation inside my flesh; a nonentity that replaces my tissues with undeterminable materials, desperation, and pain. Its nature befits cruelty, against the mind, the meat, the blood, and the soul; it gores all forms of life. Some see this process as a normal transition, an act of vanishing health at the vicinity of inescapable death, but to some of us, those in permanent ache, this weakening of the body is furthermore also a diminishing of existence, as we get relegated to a witnessing seat among other’s lives. At that moment, as if we were participants in a sickening magic trick, we began to disappear and become, socially acceptable, invisible people. Society’s development opened a path to a more conscious and polite civilization, in which modern demands for photography risen the need for a responsible eye, a contextualized documentation, and a non-exploitative approach to subjects. There is, however, an almost imperceptible boundary hidden inside this ethic approximation’s subjectivity; while current audiences had grown desensitized to certain topics, mainly violent, at the same time they are, otherwise, prone to reject themes that produce an uncomfortable reception among the accepted leitmotifs. This upbrings an absence of representation and, given that acknowledgment is a core element for unraveling a problematic, a lack of understanding will result in the nonexistence of actions focused on solving acute issues endured by certain communities. This is called invisibilization. In an ironic and conflicting twist, the kind, modern, sensible, “ethical approach” in photography can and will lead to the disappearing of some of the most uneasy, gross but necessitous, subjects from the spectator’s scene. I made these photographs because they’re me. I refuse to become invisible.

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