El Blanco

In 2007, Ricardo Cases embarked on a journey through Mali accompanied by a white man. Along the way, he photographed everything that caught his attention and took portraits of his companion, a man from Seville who basically spent his time thinking and observing. Upon his return, Cases reviewed the material and began to play with the images, starting from the idea of relating the two groups of photographs, those of his travelling companion and those of the territory he visited. However, he realised that they did not have enough autonomy to convey his intentions and, after several attempts, he decided to put the material away in a drawer.

Years later, in 2015, he returns to these images and begins to connect with them. Some suggest ideas to him: the lack of legitimacy he felt as a photographer to talk about a place he knew only fleetingly, the innocence of the gaze of the tourist who lets himself be carried away, stimulated by the randomness of the itinerary and by the exoticism of a different culture and reality; how convenient it can be to remain on the surface, in the imaginary, in the result of an experience so fleeting that it almost seems like a dream...

He then decided to organise the work based on these new premises and publish this book with the collaboration of Iván del Rey de la Torre, with the intention of creating a dance between the text and the photographs based on this melody. The relationship that is established reveals how the importance of images, in general, is not found in their materiality but in the imprint they leave on our minds, and when we create new images, they are nothing more than projections of these imprints.

This is how El blanco came about, a story that, starting from a reflection on the tradition of the representation of peripheral territories by the West, leads to a questioning of representation itself.