Free
Photo by Juan Orrantia
Like Stains of Red Dirt by Juan Orrantia brings together a series of moments that recognize an experience of a particular place. Made after living for more than 10 years in Johannesburg, South Africa, Orrantia’s gaze points inward.
Combining spontaneous, intuitive and constructed scenes Orrantia focuses in on everyday moments, gestures, objects and plants in his home and immediate surroundings, creating a space of intimacy that questions what we see, and how we choose to see it. His use of colour and shadows create a language rooted in subjective, everyday experience and imagination.
In a country marked in so many ways by colour, the photographs invite us to think of the surface as both seductive and as an illusion. They suggest emotions and anxieties as much as the presence of historical, political and representational undercurrents that traverse the context in which the photographs are made.
