When it Still Used to Snow

In the prologue of this exquisite book, Carlos Ca novas explains that Jesu s Labandeira's photographs are landscapes of memory, without sky or horizon - constructions of desire. Images in "shades that blend together into a vague grey; textures verging on nothing; photographs on the point of vanishing without leaving a trace of their existence on the white of the paper". A yearned for landscape recreated by the photographer seeking his oldest dreams. In Ca novas' words, "What can we do when the photograph from our childhood that we yearn for does not exist? When there is no fragile piece of paper showing what we were, still less what we would have liked to have been? The part of us that vanished, submerged in inaccessible abysses; which forces us to search in far-off times, hidden and protected in the snow of childhood. There it continues to play, chants reaching us but no longer moistening our dry eyes." Photographic work as delicate as it is disturbing, where the contrasts of white and black are distorted to unbelievable extremes.