W hen I started in photography, I was focused on black and white work. Rollei's with two lenses, long shot poses, country side and classic compositions. Most of this work is published in a book (Fotografías-Marcos López, Ed. La Azotea) published in Buenos Aires two or three years ago. After that book, I needed to switch to color. Ingenuously I thought that in this way I could combat my melancholic side and take life easier.

It's hard to say why someone takes on certain subjects. Is like asking myself why I like to make pictures of the maids in the hotels where I'm staying. Anyway, at the beginning I was interested in The Fatherland. Taking this series as a subjective chronicle of the end of this "Menemistic" (taken from Menem, the present day president of Argentina) century. I also wanted to emphasize in the image that I am an artist who looks from the South and from the underdeveloped world.

Tiny color mirrors and cellular phones in a painted cardboard country.

There is a sentence I like to repeat after having had some drinks, and when I eat roast with my friends: "...Compañeros, let's get back to political art partners!"(one should not forget that I was brought up in School of Cinema in Cuba).

Let's try to find a true local color to this immigrant land that always has it's gaze set on Europe...! A new color but not less authentic than the deep terracotta of the Indian America...! Cheers again!

I see Argentina rather with the discoloured façade of a disco from Patagonia . I don't use Photoshop nor Macintosh or anything like that. I'm interested in doing "real collages" and touching up manually the white of the eye and to work all over the copies with paints. In my shots I use two or three assistants with banners on the back of the characters and producing smoke with machines.

In short, this is the never ending search for identity in a country that was built with people that came off the ships. The tango we have inside. To reflect the double discourse of Modernity. All this I try to show in my photographs. Besides that, now I'm taking pictures for fun and to exorcise the pain because my girl left me.

Marcos López
Sunday, August 25, 1996