5-Portrait 5
Portraits 5, from the series Portraits
I made the series Portraits along the banks of the Llobregat river and the Rubí stream. They are images of saplings and fig trees that I invested with human characteristics, such as age and gender. The subjects have wind- and water-swept debris and vegetation attached to or wrapped around them, like clothing or adornments. The work reveals my tendency to anthropomorphize the natural world through photography to communicate about absence and presence.
Portraits is included in Janelle Lynch: Barcelona (forthcoming by Radius Books, Fall 2013), a visual elegy to my grandmother, who died in 2008, and to those lost within the very landscape in which I worked. The Rubí Stream was the site of a monumental flood in 1962, which killed nearly one thousand people. Above all, the works in Barcelona are metaphors for remembrance and invitations to consider what prevails in absence.