José Mercado studies the principle of psychological projection, and Tristan Pereira captures an ephemeral village in Canada. These are our readers’ picks #224.
José Mercado
“The outside acts as a mirror for our mind, in which we see different qualities or aspects of our own self being reflected,”
says José Mercado, a Spanish photographer born in 1973, about the series Espejo (“Mirror”). His black and white photographs reveal passers-by in the street, distorted by reflections. With this series, José Mercado examines the depths of his unconscious: “I unknowingly projected in each of the photographs what caused the rejection inside me”. His common thread is the principle of “psychological projection”, which is a “mental mechanism through which a person attributes feelings or thoughts to others that he or she denies or considers unacceptable. When I started this photographic research project, I was trying to capture the aspects that caused me to reject others.” A series that places the viewer in a game of mirrors, between what is seen and what they are trying to see.
© José Mercado
Tristan Pereira
To Tristan Pereira, a 24-year-old photographer based in Paris, photographs must “take you on a journey”. Whether he captures landscapes of the Pyrenees Mountains, or snowy views in the Canadian polar cold, the author wishes to immerse the watcher in his work. When he lived in Quebec, Tristan travelled to the Monts-Valin National Park. “We walked for a day with snowshoes on, on 60 centimetres of snow, and a guard told us about ice fishing – or white fishing, the photographer tells us. In winter time, 1’20 metres of ice freeze the fjord of Saguenay, and fishers settle on the bay of Ha-Ha”. In an atmosphere evoking the Great North, and under a freezing wind and a temperature of – 22 Celsius degrees, the author captures this ephemeral and dreamlike village, set up in an immaculate land.
© Tristan Pereira
