Artist, Milagros de la Torre: My name is Milagros de la Torre. You are looking at a piece from a series entitled Under The Black Sun. The work comprises 10 portraits. The photographs are in their negative stage. They are also tinted with a red dye.
The series was made in the Andean city of Cusco in Peru, where I began to study a photographic technique practiced by street photographers, who took instant ID passport photographs of individuals. The photographers would retouch the paper negative with red dye, which worked as a filter. The red liquid happened to be diluted mercurochrome—a disinfectant medicine for cuts and bruises. Once the photographers printed that negative, the subject would appear as if they had fairer skin and not the brown skin tonalities of indigenous citizens.
I worked with mainly the same technique of the street photographers, but I stopped midway, with the red veil of applied medicine still covering the skin of the subject.
After almost three centuries of Spanish colonialism, Peru has been defined by the oppressor and the oppressed, and skin tone served as a racial and social identifier. By not providing the lightened skin tone version of the photograph, the standards set by colonialism are undermined.
I hope you engage with the questions of identity, the reasons why we choose to represent ourselves a certain way, and the effort that goes in getting that ideal image of who we wish to be.