TOT [Signed]

Dalpine/torch press, 2022
Photographs: Ricardo Cases
Design: Ricardo Cases + Tipode Office
Postproduction: Arena Retouch
Printed by Impresum
With the support of Centro Cultural Las Cigarreras
20 x 23 cm
208 pages (2 books)
1,655 color images
Cardboard slipcase + red ribbon

In recent years, the photographic work of Ricardo Cases has focused on portraying the particularities of landscape, the precise impact that human behaviour has on it and, consequently, the nature of the people that inhabit and modify it. He concentrates on his immediate geographical surroundings (the town of Torrent, in Valencia), adopting different strategies in his search for the photographic gesture capable of encapsulating a given place in order to fully understand and convey it.

Carried out between January and June 2019 along the 15 km line separating his home from his daughter’s school, TOT responds to a double concern: on the one hand, the family- and work-related limitations in the life of a photographer; on the other hand, the limitations of the language of photography itself.

This new book is formulated as a puzzle put together from a portion of someone’s life: that of a father who is also a photographer. His day’s work begins with the pictures he takes of his daughter on the way to school, both in the car and by the entrance. The rest is an adventure where he unveils both the landscape they come across and his hopes and frustrations while attempting to capture it photographically.

With a layout evocative of comic grids as a metaphor of a life adapted to daily routine, TOT displays and exposes the research and production mechanisms behind its images, revealing the resources, difficulties and richness of nuances underlying an orderly sequence of experiences, very much like an act of writing.