Lorena Guillen Vaschetti refrained from full views that could reveal the faces and identities of the dancing aborigines when she took her photographs in Australia. Lorena turned this apparent limitation into a strength, proving how much the half can be more than the whole. Instead of ethnographic exactitude we get documentary subjectivity; instead of totality we get detail. The stylistic device called synecdoche — pars pro toto — on the whole seems to be the mirror with which she condenses reality into symbol.

Lorena Vaschetti makes the darkness her ally. The formative elements of the pictures are established as shining patterns in a dominant shadowland. It is the artist’s choice that the photograph becomes interesting when the lens is turned towards the invisible, the archetypical in the ritual; played out in the red desert of Australia.

Her photographs are not about something, they are something. They replace reality with their own formally beautiful embodiment of the patterns that control us at a deeper level: the dreams, the longings, the expectations, as they are concretized in the elaborated photographic instants in Australia. Not photographs that exploit life as lived, but photographs that create new life.

— Finn Thrane
Museum Director
Museet for Fotokunst, Denmark


You can also view the photographs in a larger format as a self-running slide show.