“Pepe” Moreno has been for many, and especially for me, above all, an age-old comrade, an involved witness of social traumas, broken and achieved dreams, and above all, vital hopes.
This work is a magical summary of the intense personal and political life of the author. It is also an exhibition that for many of us appears as a kind of redemption for those of us who, deep down, are nostalgic for analog photography. The possibility of producing a kind of visual poems by fusing photographs.
A new language freed from the necessary univocal reality that he puts in front of the camera. José Moreno, through the analog, reflects his experiences in a mirror with memory, perhaps of the same nature as ancient alchemy; they have resonances that tend to be prolonged, changing sign many times according to different times and scenarios. They are true and valid authorial exercises that successfully merge into their final timelessness, a projection of the personality of their own author. Although it is true, in these images, photography ceases to be a religion of the moment, they go beyond being fragments of life.
Curiously, they manage to express more strongly than the traditional snapshot, a totality and a synthesis. Certainly they are subjective expressions that work like a story or poetry, close to magical realism, full of identity. They are synthesis of a spirit that has not been put to sleep by the sirens of globalization, inherited from his long marriage with photography. He always maintains the importance of the heart over the eye, over the lens.
Pepe has definitely managed to associate his feelings with the visual experience in a notable way, a sort of global self-portrait of his soul.
Juan Domingo Marinello K.
Presentation text by Osvaldo Briceño in the Galería Fotocíclope exhibition:
First of all, I want to tell you in summary that it has been almost a year since we started again, with the problems of the contingency and what that has meant, but we are hopeful that new and better times will come.
We want this space to be for photographers and photographers. Jesús Inostroza has just exposed and before the outbreak did Alejandro Mendoza, Marcelo Machuca and the Argentine Ricardo Misito. We hope that these walls are always showing us the work of colleagues and we are open to receiving new ideas about it. Along with the samples, in this small room, we intend to hold meetings, workshops, classes, conversations, literary presentations, where photography is always involved. That as the first thing.
We want to thank Pepe for accepting the invitation to exhibit his work in our gallery. Monica and I are proud to have on our walls part of the works of José Moreno, of Pepe. We have known each other with Pepe for more than 30 years, I know his career in this trade and also everything that involves photography in his life. Actually, knowing a person like him is also knowing a remarkable story of a serene man, but shrewd with his senses, calm, but quick to face his camera in a situation that provokes him to photograph. The subject is, without a doubt, the human task, the daily life of the people.
Pausing in a photograph of Pepe is imagining people’s lives, a before and after that stopped moment, it is representing in the mind the images prior to the event as well as what is to come, it is looking from a low angle and effectively paying attention to the Three Marías, it is looking at the girl who wishes her sister all the luck before going on stage, it is seeing the curtain rise to make the passers-by visible in the city, it is seeing the subject unfold behind the mirror, it is remembering the torment of the PEM and the POJH, is to see Bolivia and Chile through their photography in a symbiosis of human endeavors. Each image is a memory document, they are magical tales of his experiences, rich in tones and lights. His work is photography without a last name, pure and noble, originals built in the darkroom, medium format, tangible.
To talk about José Moreno is to remember Quintana, it is also to remember the audacity of the clandestine in those times, it is to remember the AFI and compromised photography. We thank you Pepe for presenting us with this exhibition, by the way, with pride, we will make this event part of the gallery’s history. Thank you also to all of you for being here.
About José Pepe Moreno:
Founder of the Association of Independent Photographers, AFI, 1980. Director of the Photographic Archives of the University of Chile. 1983 – 2010. Publications: Antonio Quintana, 2010. A review of the Face of Chile, 2008. First Prize, O.I.T. “Work and the lack of it.”
