'first impressions' by José Luis Bravo
first impressions is a curatorial project by José Luis Bravo, materialized in both an exhibition and a publication. It brings together artists of diverse nationalities who share the experience of having studied photography in Barcelona and of sustaining an ongoing professional practice in the medium.
In contrast to the contemporary gaze—often intentionally reductionist, fleeting, and superficial, operating under the mercantilism and banality of likes—first impressions seeks to articulate and recover the moment when a complex process of formal and conceptual analysis begins, culminating in the construction of a photographic image.
Rejecting conventional exhibition formats, first impressions foregrounds the multiple dialectics that naturally emerge within a corpus of images coexisting in the same space and time. It is a commitment to the proliferation—through the gaze of each viewer—of multiple narrative and discursive possibilities that arise from encounters, resonances, and collisions among images of different authorships and origins. These are fragments displaced from their original contexts, entrusted here to the power of chance as a generator of unforeseen meanings.
