"La sofisticación de la pérdida": Usos y abusos de la fotografía en la obra de Eduardo Lalo

Abstract

This article focuses on a series of visual essays in the literary production of the Puerto Rican writer Eduardo Lalo (1960): Los pies de San Juan (2002), donde (2005), and El deseo del lápiz (2010). We analyze these books in chronological order, regarding them as a unit in evolution, an organic sequence that meticulously builds, develops, and alters a way of looking. If Los pies de San Juan represents the claustrophobic experience of the physical city of San Juan, donde transforms this experience into a condition and projects it outwards to a conceptual space that imbues everything around the speaker. In El deseo del lápiz this "conditioned" way of dwelling is taken to its extreme by suggesting prison can be interpreted as a synecdoche of all these previous experiences. By exploring fissures in the hegemonic models of visuality (in the physical, conceptual-epistemological, and institutional levels), Lalo's work blurs the imaginary line of "the distribution of the sensible" (Rancière). This means that by combining the visual experimentation of photography with the conceptual-epistemological exploration of the text, Lalo conceives a new aesthetic community that presents bodies with another way of experiencing their daily reality. At the same time, we analyze the tension created by the constant, perhaps unintended irruption of the self-referential authorial voice within the texts.