Victor Sira
' found photographs' - Victor Sira. See more of his work here
What do you do?
Victor Sira is a Venezuela-born artist/photographer whose work has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He curated the show Photography Book Dummies at the School of International Center of Photography. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions, including the Rencontres d’Arles 2005 and the show De l’Europe in Luxemburg 2007. Sira is on the faculty at the ICP-Bard MFA Advanced Photographic Studies Program in New York, where he teaches the course The Book: Imaginary Studio, A Non Stop Process and he is a member of ABC Artists' Books Cooperative.
Where did you find these pictures and why do you keep them?
Like millions of others who have emigrated far from home, the memories of each person, each landscape, each room we have from our homeland is fading, becoming invisible and forgotten. Not only our memories are growing paler and paler, but also the places themselves are changing as the people who lived there die off, or move away. For many years I have been returning regularly to Venezuela in search of these faces and landscape, which I remember, from childhood using old family photographs to give the past back its lost body collecting and arranging them in photography books.
