Flor Garduno - "Poet-Photographer"

Discovered the work of Flor Garduno in my search for photographers who are interested in delving deeply into those aspects that are at once individual and universal within each of their subjects. Acclaimed as mexico's "poet-photographer", she was a student of the legendary Manuel Alvarez Bravo before embarking on her own practice. Her series Inner Light in particular resonates with me; a collection of sensual nude portraits of female friends, each rich in metaphor and expressing an emotional and archaic language that appears to be as much a voyage through her own interior landscape as one which illuminates the multi-faceted psyches and personalities of her subjects. In fact they are so brilliantly conceived it could be said they both depict and transcend the individuality of her subjects. Most of her compositional metaphors are consistently only bipartite: to the female nude is added always only one single, mysterious symbol. The symbols used have a universal quality; flowers, wheels, swans and even a skull feature, motifs that figure widely in the myths of many cultures world-wide and as such enter the realm of the Jungian collective unconscious. Beautiful.