Eli Pimentel

I am a documentary photographer from the Dominican Republic. I also work as an economist (BA, MPA, MSc) on policy issues concerning human development and material and physical security. Some time ago, I turned to philosophy (PhD) to think on what fuels the underbelly of human intelligence and disposition.

My most important photographic subject is the person – we have such vulnerable and brief lives. How we live, our choices, how we act – these are urgent matters for there is much that would disassociate us from others if we allow it.  I like to capture moments of desperate optimism – of tempered resilience – that give substance to otherwise dispassionate considerations of what it might mean to be in a world in which what is hoped for has been radically altered by absurd yet entrenched notions of how we are expected to be. My photographic practice is inclined towards the things we hold in common: our susceptibility for wonder; an innate curiosity of the planet and all things in it; a desire for some measure of immortality, and more humbly, a longing for being seen as we go about in the world.

My latest projects give visibility to the work of social reproduction – whether in the raising of children, in social care or in the nursing profession – as essential to human wellbeing. The works presented here are inspired by social protest movements - of people becoming memory through political acts of solidarity and amity that give material presence to the work of care and social reproduction - a lifetime of labour which disappears with each passing moment, and that few get to see. This work is qualified as ‘free’, or as low-wage, low-skilled labour and does not feature as economically productive within national accounts of the measure of the market value of all goods and services, even though it is indispensable to the running of the economy.

The images featured here were shot on black and white 35mm film in October 2022 on Parliament Square, London. The March of the Mummies saw parents and carers protesting on the basis that tax allocations and social safety nets - including subsidised quality early-years care and education –  should reflect the needs of society as a whole.

Images possess a unique way of making the world sensible. What we see – and feel through what we see – has a way of making things innate without our being aware of them. Our consciousness of them is bound by the nature of the thingness of the image  - a textural, spatial and affective quality – that reveals our presence in the world is substantial though we may just be hints of flesh. Each person has a fundamental project of being, a project I relate to a journey bound up with the joys and trials of others.

Making darkroom prints evolved into casting photo objects and pithy sculptures made from thread, repurposed and re-cast functional objects. Subversive and craft-y, their ‘by hand’ quality displaces them from the private space of the domestic into a space of alterity in the hopes of drawing the viewer’s attention to the ways one can be influenced by habituated expectations of the objects featured here, and to the mechanics of such representation.

Signs of Protest

There is privilege in capturing people's private struggles and elation in witnessing that energy growing into collective outcries against the way the world is institutionalised. I realised that those struggles are embedded in the signs they carry, simple objects of words and symbols charged with hope, tenderness and defiance.

Something about the hand-crafted aesthetic of the signs – the probing nature of the text, the resigned humour – calls up feminist slogans from the previous generation and surprise us being in a world too stubborn to acknowledge the significance of creating and nurturing life. What is the worth of such labour?

Protest posters are the product of ideas, of an etiquette that governs their formation, their materiality, the space they occupy and the functions they serve. As objects, they possess solidity. My concern became one of concretising these concerns, of setting down conversations that commemorate the universality of the human experience of struggle.

Dislodging the Opacity of Objects

The tradition of making by hand indicates a visceral awareness of the limits of the body – how weight and form relate to the size of a limb, the look of a truncated torso, or a defeated monumental sad iron. Cast from life, the objects coax us from the comfort of routine into a newly imagined world of things. As long as objects fulfil their role, the past is able to confirm the present: invention and creativity are best left to the authority of cultural direction, thus representing life as a matter of repetition and not of invention, to prevent us hurtling towards the unknown.

Objects are the facts of us. Looking through objects – an exercise in discharging them from what one believes they convey, or how they ought to function – forces them to reveal what they do. A book that disturbs and makes one wish it had not been read; a lumpy mattress that leaves the frazzled sleeper miserable in the morning; food poisoning: these encounters with thingness are instantiations of an experience with objects, whose purpose has been checked and thwarted by something that provokes the unexpected. This implies the thing itself is an ambiguity. ‘What is that thing?’ is a common reaction to something our understanding or sensibility cannot quite grasp.

Objects are concrete, opaque, full of purpose. That is, until their essence or thingness checks its function. Things can be resolvable or remain a source of speculation. In a sense, then, ideas are projected onto the object, but an encounter with things is an event. What makes an object intolerable is that it is a thing and not a thing, simultaneously an object deprived of purpose, indefinable, but still there, exposing an underbelly where forms and words lose clarity and delight in contradictions.