Somnium

 

   © Photos: Manuela Quirós. Text: Federico Fuerte Guzmán

There is nothing more elevated in the real world than reality, no philosophical theory has found the arguments and words necessary to prove once and for all that a table is not a table, that he mental image of a table is superior to the table or that there is a superior being that stands above all tables and all the images of tables we have in our minds. Reality is that which is imposed to us and the eye is the sense that is imposed to the other senses to get to know it and teach it. For some years now, a strange device has placed itself In between this loving relationship reality-view.

Docile like a lapdog, the camera can capture reality just like it is, in an automatic manner, or just like the photographer wants it to. Thus, the camera becomes a tool to observe the world, let us say a philosophical body to analyze our surroundings, and depending on the use given to it, it can lean in favor of the pure and absolute object, just like it would enter our retina without interventions, or it can deform, adorn, distort and transform according to the photographer´s will.

From these treatments of the camera arise two versions of photography: the universe of the selfie, interested in the indiscriminate chase of pure reality bites and, in large measure, silent and empty; and the pictoralist vision, which deforms, kneads, distorts and redraws our environment. I´m afraid Manuela Quirós belongs to this second group and will soon, very soon, get tired of the camera, throw it against her mesmerizing images and, like the genious Renaissance man, exhort them: Speak!