Rocío (2008-2022)

Description

A self-confessed lover of analog cameras, the Chilean photographer based in Madrid reaffirms in her most personal work her predilection for the everyday—whether it’s daily meals or her closest circle. A clear example is her first photobook, Helados (Metalibro, 2020), in which she surveys the ice cream sculptures she has encountered during her travels to cities such as Madrid, Paris, Berlin, and Barcelona.

This sense of everyday life is revisited, in the form of intimate photographs, in her new editorial project, Rocío [2008–2022] x Rocío Aguirre, a photobook that looks back on her youth, going beyond autobiographical narrative to become a generational account.

Composed of “a trunk of photographs that were catalogued and organized in different ways, at different moments,” the photographer’s new work begins in Chile and travels through an extensive list of countries, portraying a generation that grew up in the shadow of the disillusionment of Generation X.

A feeling not unfamiliar to the author herself, who grew up in a country marked by Pinochet’s military dictatorship and was raised within a neoliberal, middle-class survival economy, where aspirations often meant attending private schools and maturity was shaped by a culture of divorce and economic instability.

In this way, she collected visual memories, later organized chronologically, by color, by taste, by recollection, or by beloved figures—editions that ultimately served both as psychological therapy and as tools for personal growth and development during the difficult processes of decision-making.