My pictures from Ecuador
Series of 16 archival inkjet prints. 12" x 15" Each Print.

In this project I channel the perceptions of my 10-year-old self. When I was that age, in the 1970s, we lived in Guayaquil, Ecuador. During that period, I took a series of snapshots depicting the urban ills of the “third world” as I perceived them; these I organized into a family album.  Each image in “My Pictures from Ecuador” takes the form of a page from that family album.  The accompanying text seamlessly integrates captions written when I was a child with newly constructed ones based on retrieved memories. I am interested in exploring the subtle and complex interactions between  the prevalent visual clichés of the “third world” (endlessly repeated in the discourses of cultural tourism), on the one hand, and genuine personal experience and memory, on the other hand.

Projects > Memories of Development > My Pictures from 1978


All images © Karina Aguilera Skvirsky 2013