March 2013
Artist’s Statement
What inspires my pictures is light and the hidden spaces it illuminates, especially in immigrant and working-class communities. Places where beauty is found in displaced spirits and peeling paint. My photographs describe brief moments of human existence, carried by the rhythm of a setting. They convey what is at once simple and vast, passing and constant, ordinary and intangible.
Forgotten Places is the title of my current series, capturing the road to the interior of cities and communities that exist at the edge of society, forgotten or shunned by the mainstream. My photographic journey uncovers the hidden and unspoken. They show beauty and dignity that can be found in the most forlorn places.
The images from this series reach over several continents: from the Mississippi Delta, Kamagasaki, Tohoku, Beijing, Salvador da Bahia to Cuba.
CUBA
With the fall of the Soviet Union, America’s foreign policy focus turning to the Middle East, and Castro’s Revolution two generations removed from young Americans, Cuba has fallen into the backwater of American consciousness. Once able to stir passions, Cuba now rarely enters a political conversation. Frontpage stories tend toward premature obituaries of Fidel Castro, rather than analysis or news as to what has become of the Cuban people and their aspirations.
This moment in Cuba, without political frenzy or transformation to a 21st century developing economy, allows a social documentary photographer to find artifacts of the past 54 years following the Revolution, while uncovering the first stirrings of change. For example, small entrepreneurial privately owned businesses are beginning to emerge. The marginalized often reveal deeper truths about perseverance and survival. Cuba, because of its history, has been frozen in time; its entire society exists in the margins.
Biography
Magdalena Solé is a social documentary photographer. Whether richly saturated or time worn, Magdalena uses color to encapsulate a range of feelings. She is known for her sensitive expressions of culture through distinctive color artistry. Visual language has been her life’s work. In 1989 she founded TransImage, a graphic design studio in New York City. In 2002 she graduated with a Masters of Fine Art in Film from Columbia University. Her last film, Man On Wire, on which she was the Unit Production Manager, won an Oscar in 2009.
Her projects span the globe. Her current work also includes: Kamagasaki, a photo documentary on the shunned elderly day laborers of Japan; and After the Water Receded, an exploration of the aftermath of the great 2011 Tohoku disaster, which was shown at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery in April 2012 in New York City. Most recently her photographs of the Mississippi Delta have been selected as a PDN Photo Annual 2011 Finalist. Her book New Delta Rising, published by the University Press of Mississippi, was released in February 2012. It has won the Silver Award in 2011 at PX3 Prix de la Photographie, France. She is also winner of the Silver Prize 2011 at SlowExposures, Concord, Georgia. Other shows in 2012 are Voices from Japan at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York City, Dante and the Delta at Doma Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina, The Delta at WilJax Gallery in Cleveland, Mississippi, and Sous Les Étoiles in New York City. The Mississippi Delta is on view until February 2013 at the Leica Gallery in New York.
Born in Spain, raised in Switzerland, she arrived in New York City in 1984, where she lives with her family. She speaks seven languages.
