This is an unpublished project premiered today on C41 Magazine.
Santiago Perez is a Berlin based photographer. He was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina were he studied at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism. His photographic language can be described as romantic and moody with a hint of strangeness.
He shoots primarily portrait and fashion assignments for different commercial clients and his editorial work can be seen in Vogue Italia, Vogue Arabia, The Greatest Magazine and METAL Magazine among others.
About If Only I Could Come Closer To You – words by Santiago Perez:
“If Only I Could Come Closer To You”, my first photo book, reflects on the inherent distance, the void, the abyss between two individuals and how this empty space is then filled with images, with symbolism and ultimately with romanticism, as an attempt to close the gap between the “amorous subject” and the “loved object”.
This project started as a visual research to understand love relationships, though soon after, it became clear to me that I am more interested in our relationship with love rather than the love relationship in itself.
In my early twenties a friend (and lover) gave me the book “A Lover’s Discourse” by Roland Barthes as a gift. In his book Barthes explores different figures of speech, gestures, and behaviors employed by lovers. He does this by referencing Goethe, Plato, Proust and Baudelaire among others. Through the book, we understand that the “amorous subject”, or lover, is not just formed by his individual emotions; that even before it falls for a particular “loved object”, this love has been impacted by a larger set of cultural, linguistic and visual conventions.
The following is one of the passages of the book that kept resonating with me while creating the images for this project:
“I am caught up in this contradiction: On the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other (“I know you — I’m the one who really knows you!”); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other’s origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.”
— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse.
If only I could come closer to you, maybe you would see how beautiful my construction of you is. Maybe you would then fall in love with this construction and finally with me, its creator.
As an “amorous subject” myself, I can not escape this reality. These images are therefore also about memory, about nostalgia and about idealism. They serve me (and hopefully they serve you as well) as a reminder that everything will be ok.
