PROLOGUE
We float between heaven and earth. Yes, we are here, in the body, but we are also there, in the air. Every passing minute we lose fifty thousand cells: dust, carried away by the wind. Scales that encapsulate our DNA and float on. There they are: over the sheep’s fleece, through the cigar’s smoke, hung on the thorns of the cactus flower, meshing with the paste of the fresh cocoa, with the adobe wall, forming a fine patina over our skin. Skin: that enormous organ that covers us, breathes and renews itself every four weeks. A skin that replaces another skin that replaces another skin. Without sorrow, without nostalgia. Just life reassembling itself. If the grooves and crests of our fingerprints point at our exceptionality they also point at us belonging in a multitude. I am me and what came before. I am, also, the future.
Don’t you see them? The roots.
They float in the air, the light goes through them, the photographer frames his shot, the image stops.
By Gabriela Alemán.
RAIZ
You slide your wings inside my loins.
Tearing apart the white feeling of my pupils.
Endearing snow, dying in the after-light to the heartbeat of each morning,
Drowsy and profound
you manufacture your own profanity.
Dark and calm, you display your naked self
Whole, slight, hidden, cutting the air that you breathe
Because you are Root,
the one I hold onto senselessly; the one that grabs me back, strangling the soul.
By Simón Brauer.
SYNOPSIS
Simón Brauer has imprinted on this book a family of heterogeneous images called “Root.” In them, one can see the traces of time and the different approaches to portraiture undertaken by Simon through his years as a documentary photographer.
Starting with profound explorations into framing, movement and focus; images where the pictorial treatment takes center stage making evident the (sometimes fictitious) light which bathes his characters, through direct photographs, in close up, where the black and white allows us to zero in on the faces of children, men, women and elders. Faces where the skin is observable in detail and the expressive musculature of the gestures are extolled; faces where, as time passes, the skin transforms into a turbulent bark, while the eyes contract and become absent, as if time became fossilized, like a heart where memories roamed.
This is what I want to celebrate from these images, above else: the journey the artist embarks on, from the multi-colored surface of the world to the naked humanity of the gaze, often disturbing the spectator. Photographs where man and landscape are part of a telluric unity. Thank you Simón for these images that continuously renew my admiration for your work.
By Adolfo Macías Huerta