An expanded analogue photography project exploring memory, loss and the transformation of personal archives.
Colombian photographer and visual anthropologist Sebastián Rodríguez De Castro will present "Impending Doom and the Memory We’re Becoming" at Art Space Portsmouth, as part of Photo Fringe 2026. The expanded photography project brings together experimental analogue photographs, collages, a 16mm film projection and a printed essay, working with images from the artist’s personal and family archive.
The project explores an idea embedded within the photographic act itself
Every photograph preserves a present moment while simultaneously becoming an image of something that will eventually disappear. Photography is therefore approached not only as a record of presence, but also as a medium through which absence, anticipation and loss can be experienced.
Working with photographs from his personal and family archive, Rodríguez De Castro uses analogue darkroom processes including partial development, fragmentation and analogue collage to intervene in existing images. Chemical and material processes introduce unpredictability into the photographs, allowing the artist to relinquish some control over the final image.
This process creates a feedback loop between the archive and the present. An existing photograph is revisited and transformed, producing a new image that in turn changes the artist’s relationship to the original. The photograph becomes both a record of what has been and a material through which memory is continually reconstructed. Fragmentation, disappearance and reappearance echo the ways in which people, places and memories change over time.
The project also questions the idea of the “Decisive Moment”
Rather than treating the photograph as a fixed record of the instant in which it was made, Rodríguez De Castro allows the image to remain open to further transformation. The photographic act continues beyond the moment of exposure, as the archive is revisited and the image is materially altered.
He says:
Photography became a way for me to confront the impending doom that is present in every moment, and to understand photography as a way of mourning. In the analogue process, I can step away from the control of the decisive moment and allow chance, transformation and loss to become part of the image.
The project’s approach closely connects with Photo Fringe 2026’s theme, “Feedback Loop,” which explores cycles of exchange, repetition and transformation. In Rodríguez De Castro’s work, the photographic archive does not remain fixed: each return to an image produces another encounter with the past, allowing the photograph and the memory attached to it to change together.
About the artist
Sebastián Rodríguez De Castro's practice combines documentary photography, visual anthropology and artistic research, exploring memory, identity, democracy, indigenous knowledge and human rights.
With more than seven years of professional experience in Colombia and Germany, he has collaborated with cultural institutions, NGOs, media organisations and film productions.
Exhibition Information
Portsmouth Open - Photo Fringe 2026
24 - 25 October 2026
Art Space Portsmouth
27 Brougham Road, Southsea, Portsmouth PO5 4PA, UK
