WITHIN MY SIGHT: Frida Kahlo in Black and White

“Within My Sight: Frida Kahlo in Black and White” is a portfolio of photographs I took in 2018 during the visit to La Casa Azul in Mexico City, the home where Frida Kahlo was born and grew up, where she lived for several years with her on-and-off famous husband Diego Rivera, and where, in a room on the upper floor, she died after being confined to bed for two years. When I first shared these photographs with a friend, she was surprised to see that they were black and white. “But Frida loved colors,” she said. “Of course she did,” I answered. Kahlo’s colors were her 'brand'. They also have become too familiar, to the point of a cliché, even turning into a fashion fad. Sometimes we need to remove the familiar layers to see something we may have missed. Most of these photos were taken in Frida’s bedroom, the least colorful room in the house, where she lay immobile, in semi-darkness, looking up at the butterfly collection given to her by an artist-friend, Isamu Noguchi, and installed above her head inside of the bed’s canopy. They are mostly of the only things she could see in front of her: some personal mementos of her relationship with Rivera, in a way not less torturous than her never-ending physical suffering, next to the portraits of her impossible communistic idols. They made me think more of who Kahlo really was beyond the colorful dresses, Frida in black in white, so to say. It was challenging to take photos in the dimly lit room, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, lending these images some poetic, almost ethereal, touch, best expressed in the poignant lyrics by Patti Smith, a renown song-writer, inspired by her visit to La Casa Azul. Spelled out on one of the house walls in the courtyard, they strongly resonated with what I saw and felt in the dark room upstairs. To Patti Smith I owe the titles of some of my photographs.