Self-Constructed: Ingrid Hernndez s Sense of Belonging

Photo: Ingrid Hern ndez, photo from the Tijuana Comprimida series.

Photographer Ingrid Hern ndez's stunning, in-depth record of Tijuana's developing neighborhoods, settlements, and organic compounds documents the personal lives of a community behind closed doors. Through a convergence of indoor and outdoor portraiture, her works reflect on the soul and intimacy of the city's uncontrolled environments and dreams. Hern ndez's almost sociological photographic journeys guide viewers through beginnings and migration, into a modern-day sense of belonging(s), as pilgrimages and reincarnations take invested leaps of faith towards manifest destiny. Hern ndez's photos depict a refuge in eternity and limbo on the border, a testament to the legacy of trying one's luck, sharing meals and borrowing electricity in a semi-industrialized way of life. Her images testify to the birth of a new life and neighborhood simultaneously, capturing its rituals, hardships and pensiveness in the still life of her framework and conscientious expositions.

Hern ndez is a self-made artist herself, a sociologist whose interest and passion for photography fueled her desire to venture into Tijuana's unauthorized urban landscapes. All of my life I thought I would be an academic, I have a master's in sociology, which provided me with several tools of investigation, Hern ndez says. But upon graduating, I grabbed the camera and commenced these lengthy journeys into the city's self-constructed settlements, or rather, the new neighborhoods emerging in Tijuana, those which were not residential areas with pre-designed housing, but rather plots of land where people built with whatever materials were at their reach. After several months of work based on photographs and interviews, she stopped to examine what she had. [I asked] myself what I had produced, trying to reflect upon what I was searching for in photography. I found images of self-constructed homes, of repurposed materials, and also discovered that I was not interested in traditional portraiture, since there were no people within the frame of any of my photographs.

Photographer Ingrid Hern ndez in action. | Photo: Ang lica Escoto.

The communities Hern ndez photographs play by a new world order, where the unalienable rights of expansion, substance and the pursuit of happiness justify the guilty verdict, as she digs deeper and these yearnings take center stage. Adversity raids prosperity, as Hern ndez's confidant photography asserts camaraderie and subjectivity in these multinational living quarters. The madness, absurdity, and personality of this reality on the outskirts is central to her photo essays. Her photos reflect trial and error, synthetic epochs, and decay. Hern ndez has an incessant alliance and passion for Tijuana's courage in searching to better itself.

Ingrid Hern ndez, photo from the Hecho en Casa series.

The influence of sociology lends a most distinct human quality to Hern ndez's work, a body of photographic imagery and migratory mise-en-sc ne developed through a careful methodology over time. To me it's always been important to say that one's studies give shape to something that is already of interest, in that sense, it's not like a university makes you who you are, rather you search for a university to locate and lend form to your restlessness, Hern ndez says. Hence my interest, first in sociology, then my development as an artist utilizing photography and social investigation methodology to work with the migrant population in vulnerable situations, in irregular settlements and self-constructed homes. Her major and later, her masters degree, brought her closer to anthropological and sociological investigation techniques that she later brought into her artistic practice. I was convinced I didn't just want to practice photography, I also wanted to deeply get to know the context of where I was producing images and the people that inhabited these spaces.

A mindful approach and the development of intimacy are fundamental to Hern ndez's representational perseverance and fraternity with the residents. She sought to generate a relationship through her projects, an involvement that generally takes plenty of time to construct. Each project I develop takes about one to three years of communitarian work, she says. During that time, I relate to and spend time with the community, I listen, talk and participate in different moments in the lives of the people I work with, all the while conducting interviews, taking photographs and sharing the work with them. At the end of each project, we host an exhibit at the site where the project developed with the purpose of being able to demonstrate my representation of their spaces; I also later exhibit the work via images and text that are descriptions of the context where I worked.

Ingrid Hern ndez, photo from the Outdoor series.

Characteristically shifting her focal point towards interior/exterior personal space as opposed to traditional portraiture, Hern ndez brings to light the absence of human interaction within the frame, making for an artistic statement that is both inquisitive and expository, investigative and interconnected, all the while smashing the familiarities of photojournalism. Historically, images that expose households in poverty conditions contain a charged ideological baggage based on compassion, voyeurism and the tragedies of others.' I've been working deliberately with the self-constructed household because I want to subvert that dominant representation in social documentation, Hern ndez states. In this manner, I conceive of these images based on a concept stemming from the syntax of objects and space, emphasizing the order and manner in which objects arrange themselves within the domestic environment.

Articulating

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/ingrid-hernandez-tijuana-photograp...
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