Ens/centrado Collective [Residentes del Centro Vida Juventud Cristiana A.C.] and Gabriela Elena Suárez

Gabriela Elena Suárez (b. 1986, Mexico City. Lives and works between Mexico City and Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico)


Looking for the Light

These photographs are the collective work of photographer Gabriela Elena Suárez and the young inmates at a youth rehabilitation center in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico. They are pinhole photographs—an interior space made light-tight, a pinhole the only portal to the outer world: a camera obscura, literally a “dark room.” The landscape outside is projected on the walls, floors, people, furniture—inversed and upside down. The projected image is then captured by a digital camera. In the time of Covid-19, these photographers are trapped inside. The world meanwhile, what can be glimpsed of it, is upside down and backwards, literally topsy-turvy. “The virus is not so scary when you know worse things,” states Suárez, “and in those moments all that remains is working to find the light.”