Germngmez

The first lie of photography is embedded in what is considered its foremost truth: “The camera never lies.” What you see is what you get, they say. This does serve art well. Photography’s so-called claim to truth has been the point of departure of innumerable artists who play with what we viewers think a photograph represents. This is most valid of course in documentary photography and photojournalism where we are led to assume that what is in the photograph actually happened and was so represented by the camera through the optical-chemical (or electro-optical) means of photography without retouching or using Photoshop.
Artists using photography have exploited this claim to verisimilitude shamelessly. Germán Gómez is an artist who likes to have it both ways. Trained in art history and special education, he is obsessively concerned with representation and portraiture, especially self-portraiture. His pictures, however, are never of himself. Rather, he takes up the notion, following novelists, that all fiction is, essentially, autobiography.
In an interview with Alejandro Castellote, Gómez writes, “All my work is a self-portrait, from the disabled children series to Compuestos (Composited, 2004) and of course this project Fichados Tatuados (On the Record Tattooed, 2005-06), which was conceived as a self-portrait.” In this, he follows the lead of his teacher, the famous photojournalist and documentary photographer Cristina García Rodero, who all but ordered him to “Take photographs of what you know, of what is really important for you.”
With this point of departure in mind, Gómez embarked on a number of photographic series that directly addressed issues of representation, identity, and the spectrum of masculinity. For the most part, Gómez photographs men and re-contextualizes the images through the use of superimposed cut-outs, literally stitched together, projections, or digital manipulation. In Compuestos he combined portraits of more than fifty men in his circle and composited the images. He describes the project as “A self-portrait in which I do not reflect my face but those of fifty men that lend not only their faces but also their bodies to become the support of my life. I believe that the fact that it is not my face amplifies the work.” His later series, Del susurro al grito (From a Whisper to a Scream, 2006) takes as its lead a line from the 1984 song by The Icicle Works, "We are, we are, we are ever helpless / take us forever / a whisper to a scream". That also spoke of the suffering of many of his friends and, in general, the human condition.
The multifaceted nature of identity that is at the heart of Gómez’s work has psychoanalytical roots in the sense that we build our identities not merely from our own personal identification but, following Freud, from our perceptions of ourselves and how we are perceived by others. Thus superimposed images, the Gritos or the Fichados Tatuados with their over-determining narratives disguised as police records, do not necessarily refer to the subjects of his portraits.
Identity is not always that which we maintain; it is often imposed from without by society’s rules and regulations and social mores. There are those who cannot or chose not to fit into the norm. In his 2003 work, Igualito que su madre (Just Like His Mother), Gómez photographs transvestites wearing make-up and feminine hairstyles. These simple portraits are mere headshots but to the spectator at least depict those people crossing gender and identity boundaries. Their secondary sexual characteristics—moustaches or hairy chests—contrast with the femininity of their artifice—the carefully contrived look of a woman made up to go out on the town. These are real portraits that present an image that does not represent what society would ordinarily expect of male human beings. Gómez gives us an image of how these people wish to see themselves, as real people with all of the self-assertion of their own identity in the face, literally, of social norms.
Gómez writes, “I cannot imagine a non-biographical photography. I take pictures as if I wrote a diary. The portrait has always been my language. In a portrait I am especially interested in and intimidated by the depth of the eye. To be able to grasp the look has always been the link between my life and my photography.” If photography always lies, as it does, then, truth in a photograph is invariably fiction. What you see is not what is, but rather, what we take it to be. All of his portraits are self-portraits, and the autobiographical fiction, retouching and Photoshop be damned, in the composited final images is the real Gérman Gómez.