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I thought if I took enough photographs I would never lose anyone. In fact, what my photographs showed me was how much I’d lost. Nan Goldin PS One shouldn’t marry dumb men. In 1973 Susan Sontag pointed out that photography had changed the world into a series of autonomous particles. She was referring to the image as a slice of time and space that, by means of a frame, not only fragmented reality in an arbitrary way, but made it possible to create unsuspected continuities between things by manipulation of their fragments.1 Ten years later, ways of perceiving and articulating surroundings were restated after the dissolution of a unitary social space the existence or hyper-reality of which seemed to be subject to its prior representation as an image.2 Much of the photography that developed during the ’80s did so with the precision of theatrical production. The photography of the ’90s, however, sought to restore the immediacy and the documentary character of traditional photography. However, this sort of recovery was not intended to take the shape of an ethical commitment to a society the values of which had become victims to manipulation and mass consumption. The recovery of a personal view of the dynamics of collective space seems to have been carried out from a quotidian and intimate perspective. The realistic and instantaneous record of this was less obedient to coordinates of precise time and specific space than to the evanescence of the transitory and the mutability of non-place. In this sense Katya Brailovsky’s photographs appear as presence not as representation, for they no longer intend to consolidate the capture of a decisive moment but to signify, like grimaces and repairs, their intermittence and fragility. Her images establish an improvised equilibrium in which the public event and private life join in their simple occurrence, a woman in a bar in New York (Odessa, 1999) or a child running through Mexico city square (Niño, Zócalo, 1999). More than portraying the transcendent realism of the quotidian, Brailovsky’s diffuse and de-centered compositions look like a disoriented wink that eludes any contextual reference. In spite of the fact that the before and after comes through in her photography, these references can only be intuited as absences that offer, or suffer, a spectral aura. Brailovsky’s subjective and diachronic narratives somewhat like monologues arise from the juxtaposition of isolated moments and conciliation the scattered fragments of selective memory. Both the books she conceives and the projection of her photographic sequences, follow a guideline which, even though they lack or do not require structure, they do not avoid reality. Thus, offered as alternate configurations, the former, constitute a kind of compendium in which the disguised readings of text and image are interwoven to establish correspondences that are fleeting and without reciprocity. The latter, like babble without hierarchy inflict a rhythm of observation on the spectator, portraying what he sees more than what remains. Separately or jointly, Brailovsky’s photographs reveal an accidental but scrutinizing eye which, while it creates a dispersed series of anecdotes, dilutes the events themselves. Thus, images make a wedding out a funeral (Funeral de Joan, Virginia, 1999), propose a fragmentary portrait of, say Soledad in different scenes (Soledad, Soledad bailando, Soledad llorando, 1999), and shift us to Cholula or La Macaria through the crack of a door. Of the spectrum of daily mythologies to which Brailovsky never grants a descriptive framework, all that is left to us is their own banality and the singular character granted by their in-transcendence.

Magalí Arriola Translated by John Page
1 Sontag, Susan. On photography, Anchor Books, New York, 1990, pp.22-23
2 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Semiotext(e), New York, 1983

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