[dropcap type=”3″]T[/dropcap]he affection and romance were totally absent in her parents’ marriage and therefore in their house. And eventually, this became the trigger of series of events that played a major role in shaping Alex’s personality and her work. The photography that she creates is a mix of love and distress, because they are the basic components in the relationship with her parents.
My Own Private Macondo was born in the period of the illness of her father. During four weeks Alex photographed the routine of the recovery of her father and to her, this became the most important psychological analysis on the eternal conflicts between the generations and a path to acceptance and mutual understanding. The scar on her father’s belly that appears on one of the photos is a symbol of a rebirth of their finally united family. All the photos were shot in Odessa, the city where her parents currently live. To highlight the regret of the time spent on family drama and the longing for carefree life in the parents’ house, she used both colour and black & white and also worked with analogue and digital camera.
The name of the project is inspired by the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude of Gabriel García Márquez, where the author pictures Macondo as a city of bizarre happenings and peculiar people. This same magic realism so typical for a Colombian writer has always been present in the attitude of her Ukrainian parents. Their talks, environment they live in and people they relate to, it all comes together in an eccentric real-life tale.
About the author:
Alex Blanco was born in 1988 in Odessa, Ukraine. She studied Journalism at Universidade Anhembi Morumbi in Sao Paulo, Brazil and currently lives and works as a photographer in the Netherlands.
