Do you believe in real ghosts?
There’s no scientific proof that ghosts exist. By now, scientists have developed technology that could definitely tell if spirits made out of energy were lurking among us. The Large Hadron Collider, for instance, would’ve noticed their presence. Nonetheless, why do we feel haunted by them? Perhaps, they only live within our own minds. They’re the specters of our memory and desires.
The photography of Rene Carlos shows just how much we’re controlled by these intangible spirits.
Engaging the viewer within hazy images in dynamic compositions, he captures us in the fog of ghostly romantic encounters in lonely, cheap motels. They’re ephemeral, precipitous, and fickle. Looking at the frenetic movement that tangles up the sheets and later stops, reminds how being with someone is always an experience that goes by too quickly. The hazy movement of the specter-like lovers is something that relates to every memory we have of a night of passion . For a minute, we’re rejoicing in pleasure with the person. The next, everything’s gone.
Time keeps running, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We seek pleasure desperately. But, once it reaches us, it’s not long before we see it vanish. Carlos’ photographs remind us of how desire, romance, and longing are always part of the equation.
On top of the beds of lonely motel rooms, Carlos’s pictures transmit a sense of passion that is also imbued with a crippling sensation of yearning. The blurry bodies within the frame feel just as intangible as nights of passion gone by. Memories gets twisted and faded. We can only remember ourselves and our partner as the distorted bodies in the pictures. As much as we’d like for a night like that to last forever, there’s nothing we can do. As the images show, the only thing that remains is a blur.
The atmospheres in Carlos’s images are often suffocating. Creating spaces where the light is mostly a tungsten kind of yellow, he positions the viewer within the scenes of intangible lust. He turns us into voyeurs, peeping toms, looking through the keyhole of the rooms where these romantic encounters take place. When we observe them closely, it feels as if someone raised the temperature in our brains. Entrapped in these overwhelming emotions, we cannot help but sweat.
The photography of Rene Carlos doesn’t focus only on taking pictures of lovers in a low shutter speed that gives the illusion of the fast passing of time. To convey the distortions and blurriness that accompany passion and desire, he also plays with optics to interfere the scenes and bodies that he portrays through is photography. Breaking the image, he touches over the subject of how our minds break the past, making us look at it from a different angle, but always captures the scenes in an alluring fashion that shows how we’re held captive by our own lust, even if we can’t figure out why.
Through his captivating work, the artist shows how, in a certain sense, we’re all captive to our strangest desires. He reminds us that, regardless of how much joy we might experience in a single moment, pleasure and happiness are fleeting. There’s no need of constantly looking into the past. This is a ghost that we cannot set ourselves free from.
René Carlos is a photographer based in Mexico City. He’s a graduate from the National University’s school of Art and Design (FAD), and the renowned San Carlos Academy. His series PD (“pulsión dinámica” tr. ‘dynamic drive’) focuses on the nature of desire and how it’s propelled by the difference of who we are and what we do against what we long to be. Apart from his artwork, he also focuses on fashion photography.
See more of his work on Facebook and Instagram.
