“Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention”, wrote Susan Sontag in her emblematic book On Photography (1973). For the camera to disappear and for reality to pass unchanged before its lens, is one of the ideals of photojournalism. But often, the presence of the photographer and their camera generates an interaction with the person being photographed and a visible impact on the scene.
The Quidam project, by the photojournalist Santi Palacios, revolves around that moment precisely in which those being photographed discover the camera. For more than fifteen years, he has been saving the images that capture an interaction between the camera and the person being photographed and, ultimately, the person looking at the image.
“In my work there has always been a constant desire to disappear from the images, to be invisible, with the intention of refining a visual language that seeks a natural approach to the story. This has led me to turn away from those photographs in which someone is looking at or reacting to the camera, photos which I discard immediately, with few exceptions, when editing with a publication in mind”, explains the photojournalist. But the review of an archive containing thousands of photographs in different contexts has revealed that “being invisible is very difficult, it takes a long time and, sometimes, depending on the nature of the story you’re working on and how you’re doing it, it can remain an illusion”.
Through Quidam, a project he has been developing since 2007, Santi Palacios reveals a side of the photographic process that is often hidden in the results that are shown. The project name comes from the book Sociedades movedizas (Shifting Societies) (Anagrama, 2007), by the anthropologist Manuel Delgado, in which he refers to the Latin term quídam: “Someone who passes by and who only exists in so far as they pass; someone unknown, no one in general, everyone in particular”.
The photographs included in this project meet three requirements: someone looks at the camera, none of them is posed even though it may seem like it is, and the photographer doesn’t know the names of the people who appear in them. “They are people you come across and don't know anything about, but with whom you share a moment through the camera.”
These images, selected from a very wide-ranging project and commented on by the author himself, capture that brief moment when the camera, in very different settings, generates an interaction between strangers. “These are moments in which the person being photographed has spotted the photographer, in which a single look puts more truths on the table than the visual intentions of the viewer. In many cases, they are also moments when I wanted to drop the camera and stop being a photographer”.
This is just a brief sample of a project made up of hundreds of images, for any professional inquiry contact here