"Remember Who You Once Were" is not just a collection of images, it’s a reflection of a personal journey and a call to awaken something deeper within. It’s about rediscovering what was lost or forgotten, reconnecting with the raw, untamed parts of ourselves that society often pushes aside. This project was born out of a desire to explore what happens when we disconnect from who we truly are, and the process of reconnecting with that essential, wild self.

The quote by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, "Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back, through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered…" resonates deeply with me. It’s a powerful metaphor for the reclamation of one’s true nature, an ongoing process of shedding the layers we’ve accumulated over time, expectations, fears, societal pressures and returning to something primal and authentic.

Through my work, I’ve been exploring that tension, the space between who we are told to be and who we are deep down. The act of searching for the hidden self is a delicate and intimate journey. It’s not always clear or linear, and at times it feels like a struggle between letting go of old identities and embracing new ones. In this process, I’ve used photography as a way to capture moments that reflect both the struggle and the beauty of transformation.

For me, the images are not just about capturing what’s visible but about symbolizing something internal, a shift from external noise to inner silence. They evoke the process of stepping away from the world to recharge, to reconnect with the instinctive, powerful self that exists within each of us.

Text & voice : Elizabeth Alderliesten

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The deeper I delve into the theme of transformation, the more I realize it’s about embracing vulnerability and authenticity. The act of reconnecting with my inner self has often felt like being reborn, letting go of the constraints of societal expectations and feeling free to grow into my true form.

ELIZABETH ALDERLIESTEN

Dordrecht (NL), 1972

Elizabeth Alderliesten is a Dutch artist and her main medium is analog photography. She currently lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.

FRESH EYES Photo selected her as one of the 100 greatest emerging photography talents in Europe of 2020, she is featured on one of the four covers of the yearbook. She is also included in GUP New Photo Talent yearbook 2020.

She attends the year-long Photobook Workshop with Nearest Truth last year. In 2022 she participated in a workshop with Dirk Braeckman and Brad Feuerhelm in Athens. From 2020 until 2022 she attended Le Masterklass with Klavdij Sluban in Paris. In 2019 she followed an Masterclass with Machiel Botman in Amsterdam. She graduated from the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam in 2019.

https://www.elizabethalderliesten.nl/

Text & voice: Elizabeth Alderliesten

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THE RIDGE is the name of a strip of forest that cuts through New Delhi from north to south, set on the hills of an ancient mountain, the Aravalli Range. Until the 19th century, it spanned rugged, rocky terrain, later reforested by the British with the aim of creating a colonial garden. To achieve this, they introduced a tree from Central America called Prosopis juliflora, which quickly spread across the region, altering the landscape: the trees grew, and the hills became covered with shrubs and undergrowth. Slowly, the garden transformed into a jungle, protected by its own density.

One morning, I found a cluster of houses by the forest that I had never seen before. There, a fallen but still living tree stretched across the main street, blocking cars from entering an area full of small gardens. “We don’t move the tree; this way the road stays empty. In Khyber Pass,” they told me, “we love silence.” The men shelter from the rain and talk beneath the trees, under the large rocks where children play. I often returned to one of the houses, on whose rooftop two peacocks nested, unaware—just like me—that the neighbourhood was disappearing. There, nothing moves, and each place delivers its message through what it discreetly reveals: a luminous presence that lingers, a plant that rises and waits.

https://www.materiasolar.com/

Text: Pablo López

Voice: J. (AI)

In the place where I write, there are several images that make me reflect on my bond with photography. One of them shows a mound of earth, its outline resembling a mountain range darkened by clouds. Is it a mountain, or simply a pyramid of sand? Close by, I’ve placed a small branch from a forest in India: it still holds each of its leaves, now tinged with yellow. In Delhi, I photographed trees along the roadside, trees by rivers, and behind walls. The images speak to one another, and my eyes move from one to the next, tracing similarities. Through these elements, the landscape has taught me its language—one made of shimmering shadows and stones. My work is to find the right distance, listening closely, because only attention will make me pause when the murmur that precedes an image begins. It is out in the field—in the midst of the work—where fatigue becomes part of the experience, and the feeling prevails that nothing more will happen. Only the commitment to that emptiness matters, to this earthly dedication we have embraced. Some photographs, I think, keep alive the mystery of the visible. Perhaps they emerged from an elemental love for surfaces, for the quiet way the world settles. I’d like to trace that ancient mystery, and under the pretext of documentation, wander through an undefined terrain, shaped by form and silence.

My way of working is often erratic and spontaneous. I rarely see images as part of a series, and can shoot anything from a piece of orange peel, a shaggy street cat or a stranger’s nose in a shop window reflection within a few short moments of each other.

In the early days of social media (I used Flickr and Tumblr) I remember being struck by the strange allure of seeing a grid of images lined up, all on one page. Each pixel-filled square is autonomous yet, at the same time, a narrative is still present.

It seemed to me that within the confinement of this space, a lot could happen. The broader the scope, somehow the richer the imagery appears.

With this, my hard drive becomes a vital tool and searching through an ever-growing arsenal of images is a perpetual process - one where I continue to hop from place to place.

Working spontaneously, with only perhaps a vague idea of what I hope to create, means that I’m more receptive to possibilities. Images can suddenly become imbued with meaning, and variables such as chance and what I call 'a certain trained laziness' (permanently having a bank of unclosed files in photoshop) can come into play.

It’s a tempting question to ask, but the meaning of what ‘lies behind’ an image does not interest me at all. I have felt for some time that my role is to just be a vehicle to whatever transpires. I adopt this approach also with my painting, which feels even more physical - a channeling of some unknown force, or sometimes a simple desire to be understood without words.

Voice-text-photo : Lydia Roberts

https://www.lydia-roberts.com/

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Lydia Roberts b.1994 is an artist and photographer from England. The root of her interest lies within image making that remains unaffected by time, with the human form emerging as a reoccurring motif. She currently lives and works in the Occitanie region of France.

https://www.lydia-roberts.com/

Text and voice: Lydia Roberts

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Inspired by Walker's photographs, especially the remarkable portraits he made in 1936 of sharecropper families in Hale County Alabama, 1 bought a used 4x5 Deardorff view camera and spent the summer of 1972 in Brantville, New Brunswick Canada, small Acadian fishing village. As a volunteer with the Quebec Labrador Foundation, I ran a day camp for the local children and lived with fisherman Ulysse Thibodeau, his wife Jeannette and their three young children. When I wasn't making puppets or playing Capture the Flag with campers, I was making photographs of the Thibodeaus and their extended family and friends. They were my eager and generous collaborators whenever I set up my view camera that summer and on three more visits to Brantville.

The field next to our house became a constantly changing stage for making photographs. There were several small houses, a barn, often a car or truck or boat, bicycles, laundry, a rabbit hutch and pig pen, buoys, lobster traps, and, in winter fishing nets hanging on poles. I don’t remember anyone ever refusing to be photographed. On the contrary, children and adults, too, were happy to be photographed. A view camera was new to everyone and made the process special. They were fascinated watching me open the camera, disappear under my black cloth, and begin making adjustments to the camera but also giving them suggestions. Then I would come out from the black cloth, hold the shutter release, and watch closely. When I saw an expression or gesture or the light shift slightly, I tripped the shutter. I think it was a combination of wanting to help me and delighting in being seen.

During the pandemic, isolated from my family and friends, I revisited my Brantville negatives. My friends in Brantville were as excited as I was to see what I printed (many prints were from negatives I printed for the first time) and to celebrate the exhibition of the work at Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the official museum of New Brunswick.

Stanley Barker Books (London) has published Brantville, 50 black and white photographs made between 1972 and 1974.

https://www.stanleybarker.co.uk/products/brantville

Text: Melinda Blauvelt

Voice: Juniper (AI)

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Melinda Blauvelt studied photography at Yale with Walker Evans, was the first woman in Yale’s MFA photography program, went on to teach at Harvard, and has her pictures in major museums throughout the United States. Inspired by Evans’ 1930s photographs of rural America, she began a unique project in 1972, which she only recently unearthed and printed.Melinda decided to spend that summer photographing the small fishing village of Brantville, New Brunswick. She lived with a fisherman and his family, ran a day camp, and made remarkable portraits of the village residents. Bill Shapiro, former editor of Life magazine, calls her Brantville images “quietly riveting, somehow managing to be big-hearted while not sentimental, clear-eyed but not cynical, highlighting our human quirks and our warmth in equal measure.” This important collection of black & white photographs depicts a time when New Brunswick, and particularly the Acadian Peninsula, was going through deep social changes. They speak to the values of community, family, and the ability of brilliant images to frame and extend our ability to truly see a place.

https://melindablauvelt.com/

Text: Melinda Blauvelt

Photograph: ©Chad Floyd in @1973 in Brantville NB Canada

Voice: Juniper (AI)

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As with many projects, “hearth” was born from a collection of photos that, at first glance, seemed unconnected, like a bunch of beads with different shapes and sizes that have been forgotten at the bottom of a plastic box.

There is something playful about photographic projects that fascinates me. They are like putting together a necklace with different pieces, where the challenge is to find their place, imagine the missing ones and assemble them until, in the end, an organic whole is formed where each image flows into the next.

Although the pieces had different shapes and sizes, they shared the same color: a tinge of latent nostalgia, a kind of tone of longing that helped me to begin to weave them together and ask myself questions.

Over the course of a year, with the support of Veronica Fieiras, I gave shape to this necklace. These images were made between my adopted France and my native Argentina, and began to intertwine with archives, video excerpts and documents.

Thus, they became an essay on uprootedness, sense of belonging and the concept of home, entitled “hearth”. In Old English, the word refers both to the place where one lives (home) and to the fire that gathers the family and the community (fireplace).

A home is not built with bricks.

https://maximilianotineo.com/

Text: Maximiliano Tineo

Voice: Chris (AI)

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I feel that I cannot photograph anything that I don’t feel related to, so I remain attentive to the type of vibration in which I can recognize myself. From the beginning, photography has been deeply connected with evasion, with that need to separate myself from the world I was in. Maybe that's why it has always been linked to movement, accompanying me in my escapes and functioning as an escape valve. First as a companion of writing, and then occupying more and more space, until it became the main vector of the narrative.

From this need to escape, trips emerged. In my evasion, I went far, far away, crossing other continents, inhabiting places with languages other than my own, exiling myself voluntarily. In the desert, for example, solitude is so pure that it admits no excuses.

The camera was always there, like a silent witness, documenting not only what was happening outside, but also what was happening inside. Because when I take pictures, I become a mirror, yes, but the reflections that I project are also rooted in my guts.

Photography, writing, and fanzine publishing have been the media that have portrayed my search for a home, a place and a time from which I no longer want to escape.

https://maximilianotineo.com/

Text: Maximiliano Tineo

Voice: Chris (AI)

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