Visual Identity

2022

I have been living in Lima since 2017. I moved from Italy to Peru because I wanted to deepen my long-term project on mining and to better understand Peruvian culture and society by experiencing them every day. While traveling through the Andes, I visited many homes and lingered on the photographs that people had hanging on their walls—images that represented them, enlargements of their ID photos. I often wondered how people here perceive their own image, and I wanted to understand it more deeply.

So, in recent months, I began a photographic project on visual identity in the Peruvian Andes. I have been working with a local photographer (Yhon Alex Huachaca López), comparing our two photographic visions, our image cultures, and the way people are represented. More and more, I ask myself if it is right to represent the Andean subjects I photograph through my European gaze, and I felt the need to work on this.

My father, a small-town photographer in Italy, spent 40 years photographing people for their identity cards. As a child, I used to spend entire afternoons in his shop, and I remember people coming to be photographed in elegant clothes, some even after going to the hairdresser. Ferdinando Scianna says that the most important photo for a person is the one he keeps in his wallet.

So I went to an Andean photographer who takes passport photos, and I photographed the same subjects he photographed, but with my own vision—European and sometimes, perhaps, a little exotic. In the Andes, it is very common that after photographing people against a white background, the photographer Photoshops elegant clothes onto them. Reflecting on this, at first I thought it was all wrong, even illegal. If we understand photography as memory, by doing so you create false memories; through photography, you attempt to establish yourself socially and create the illusion of belonging to a different class.

I thought about all this, but then I remembered the people who came to my father’s shop, dressed specifically to be photographed. And I realized that, in the end, it was exactly the same thing.

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Exhibition

Ser y Aparecer - Cortona On The Move

Palazzo Baldelli - Cortona - Tuscany - July 14 - October 2, 2022

While traveling in the Peruvian Andes, Alessandro Cinque looks at the photographs hanging on the walls of campesinos’ houses, often enlargements of passport photos. He then meets Yhon Alex Huachaca López, who takes headshots for a living, and with the help of photoshop makes the people he portrays appear in their best version, in clothes they don’t own and in roles they don’t play in real life. This is how “Ser y aparecer” was born, resulting in a project that Alessandro Cinque developed in parallel with Yhon’s shots, following the subjects in their homes and photographing them in their daily lives.