On October 29, 2024, a flood struck the province of Valencia, devastating towns and claiming the lives of hundreds of people.
Among the immense material and emotional losses was one more: Ricardo Cases’s library. A surge of water swept through the photographer’s studio, carrying away the 800 books that, over the years, had shaped his understanding of photography—and of life itself.
When it was over, the books were recovered, scattered along the ravine, soaked and coated in mud. This gave him the chance to say goodbye to the volumes whose pages, once dry, had stuck together forever. In doing so, he discovered that those fundamental and enduring images by the masters of photography—ones he had looked at so many times—had been literally wrapped in mud, suddenly forced to speak of more urgent matters.
As he peeled the pages apart, the photographs recombined into arbitrary collages that cried out with an unknown meaning. All that knowledge and emotion consolidated in the archive we thought we knew had been erased—like veins in the mud, traces of what once was.
A different function emerged: that of an archaeology of emotions, where time, photography, and mud intertwined to create new meanings.
Documenting all of this was the photographer’s reaction to loss: what perished gave birth to something else.
Thus, the photographs of photographs gathered in this Catálogo are not only a testimony to an irreparable loss, but also to the reconstruction of the lost library. Over time, the same water that once dried the mud will flow again. The new archive points toward memory and oblivion—between the two lies the possibility that the certainties we live by might disappear from one day to the next.
Year: 2025
Format: 21,8 x 16,5 cm
Publish by: selfpublished
Design: Tipode Office
Copies: 400
Printing: Impresum
Pre-printing: Arena Retouching
Pages: 136
Number of images: 67
ISBN: 978-84-09-76067-1
