The Shadow and the Flash
In 2003, Iñaki Bonillas inherited a collection from his Basque grandfather, José Rodríguez Plaza, who had arrived in Mexico as an exile from Spain decades earlier. J. R. Plaza had an expansive imagination. He photographed himself dressed up as various characters from American Westerns and made business cards for jobs he never held. The J. R. Plaza archive would become an enduring long-term project for Bonillas, one of Mexico’s most insightful artists when it comes to transforming the field of photography. His rigorous, decidedly experimental methodology encompasses photography, video, installation, site-specific interventions, and artist’s books.
Bonillas, who in his youth worked as an “assistant to the assistant” in the photographer Carlos Somonte’s studio, has long been interested what he calls the “extra-photographic aspects of the medium.” In his deeply researched exhibition projects, from interventions inside Casa Luis Barragán to collaborations with bookbinders, he pushes beyond the two-dimensional to plumb private and collective memory. His work integrates photography in a creative process wherein reality, fiction, and the fluctuating worlds of word and image all coexist.
All of this was on display last year in Ya no, todavía no (No longer, not yet), his first solo exhibition at Kurimanzutto, in Mexico City, which drew upon the techniques and skills of analog photography and what the filmmaker Robert Bresson has referred to as “the intelligence of the hands.” “I am a curious, restless person,” Bonillas told Iván Ruiz when they spoke recently at Bonillas’s studio in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City. “I constantly feel the impulse to extend my research to other territories.”
I’m like a kind of attic photographer, someone who’s more attuned to the residue of what someone has forgotten in the darkroom.
Iván Ruiz: Iñaki, you started your ascent in the world of photography very early. How do you situate yourself in relation to your precociousness?
: I don’t know exactly why, but one day, when I was very young, I expressed to my mother that I had a certain interest in photography. This would have been in the early ’90s, when I was still in high school,
