Published: 12.12.2019
The first photobook by plastic artist and photographer Leslie Osterling highlights the importance of family and lived experiences. It was during a Master Class of the Spanish photographer José María Mellado, in which she participated, where she met the curator José María Díaz-Maroto, (review and critique of the work) who proposed directing her in the production of this book. The project took about a year between the collection of material, selection of images and writing of texts.
Footprints, memory and time, is the crystallization of this work where he shows different stages of his life, a personal history, interspersed with a chronology of affections. The images are intertwined based on the composition of shapes, planes, color and visual rhythm, with poetic texts of some songs that are related to the creative stage of the photobook.
There is a kind of marriage between the visual and the selected music that complement the experience of reading and perceiving the content of this book. The work runs between landscapes, intimate portraits, natural spaces and urban landscape. But the photographs transcend the personal and connect with a sense of the ephemeral, of past glory and the decline of existence.
“The result of this selection is something more than a succession of well-ordered images with objective criteria. When making the composition, history, daily reporting, humanity, warmth and landscape have been pursued, but without falling into the exotic for the sake of the exotic and the simply distant for being distant. Intimacy, family life, the personal, in short, that which is intuited but that we are not able to see on first reading is precisely represented in the work of Leslie Osterling. On many occasions, a double gaze arrangement is the most particular mechanism of a good photograph. A current vision of what is simulated, the refinement of the indeterminate and the naturalness of the ordinary, perpetually leads us to reflection”, points out José María Díaz-Maroto.
Osterling proposes listening to a playlist while looking at the book, which offers an additional sensation, an eclectic list of songs that combines performers as diverse as Marlene Dietrich, Andrés Calamaro, Katie Melna or Pablo Milanés. The verses “Everybodygotteheirreason / Everybodygotteheirway” from Catch and release by MattSimons, explain the selection criteria in an unbeatable way.
“I have a fixation for capturing time, for not letting go of what I see and feel and also do it well, always looking for the perfect frame and the most beautiful light. The images become history and this is a fraction of the collective memory to which we belong.
We are just a conduit of memories in the time machine, which is life. And each one of my photos becomes a trace of my brief passage through the world, which hopefully, who knows, will make someone else vibrate, who is in the same tune”, says Leslie.
