Quiéreme Mucho — Cristina Velásquez

Quiéreme Mucho (Love Me A Lot) is a selection of recent and old work by Cristina Velásquez. Her image-making process consists of two parts. The first one, in which she lets herself guide by intuition to shoot the images; and the second, in which she edits and dissects the work, looking at it through a critical lens while she questions her decisions, crops the images, and examines her impulses.

“The play of power is essential to the understanding of photography. With time, I’ve realized that through photography, I can subvert the dominant structures of power that for years have separated people from one another. Photography allows me to wrestle with the complexities of the colonial-white-mono-narrative in my past and present, in an effort to create an alternative one in the future.

I am interested in acknowledging the subjectivities that permeate the act of representing —oneself, and the other— starting with the power imbalance inherent to the medium, that mirrors a larger system of social editing. Through photography, I have a chance to reclaim my own identity, and by doing so, complicate the visual alphabet and resist the threats of cultural assimilation, which feel very violent to me. I understand picture-making as one of the most effective ways to shift narratives about who counts in the world.”

— Cristina Velásquez