“Of course they will find it difficult to situate them historically. They must feel free to see them as images that evoke something in their own minds. They’re illustrations inspired by a theme, actually, rather than depictions of a particular story, I think.”
– Paula Rego
Though she was speaking about her own images, Paula Rego offers us a framework for approaching the descriptively specific yet allusively lyrical work of Lúa Ribeira. It is safe to assume that Ribeira would also see the applicability of this observation, as the quote itself is included in a four-fold removable sheet that accompanies Ribeira’s photobook Subida Al Cielo (Ascent Into Heaven) (Dalpine, 2023) and which, along with a myriad of other quotes, images, and sketches, offers a glimpse into the influences and sources of inspiration orbiting around and informing the photographs themselves. The sheet is a welcome guide to the 102 images that Ribeira uses to build her sequence and which can, at least at first, seem separate and distinct even though each of them is expressed with a clarity of vision and consistency of style. It is one of the great achievements of her book that the pictures in it, drawn as they are from five different projects made between 2016-2020, are sufficient enough in their own formal rigor and narrative implication to stand on their own while also seeming to fit together effortlessly through sequence. This apparent seamlessness, though, does less to smooth out the differences between her subjects in Bristol and those in Tijuana, or between those in Andalucía and Galicia, than it does to underline a similar psychological texture to their worlds, one that Ribeira creates just as much as she responds to.
Sits with a baby in her arms. Vision. (2017) from the series Subida al Cielo (Ascent into Heaven) © Lua Ribeira/Magnum Photos
The book opens with pictures taken from the titular project that Ribeira made in public parks across Bristol between 2017-2018, and in their style and tone they prime us for what the rest of the book will show. Ribeira has spoken of these parks as spaces where a kind of regimented or proscribed urban experience could break down and give way to something more spontaneous or unpredictable. What carried those qualities were her encounters (the word “encounter” is key for Ribeira for its emphasis on the unexpected) with people in various states of dissociation, distress, repose or elation—people on the margins of society who may have found in those parks a temporary respite from their struggle for social support or material subsistence. The pictures she made of them refrain from taking a moralizing or critical position, and even if we can surmise that Ribeira herself would wish to rectify these conditions and the respective misfortunes they describe, the pictures do not stake out a position on, for example, the experience of poverty, homelessness, or the ill effects of sustained drug use. Though it can be difficult to determine what dramatic or psychological tone is meant to prevail in these pictures, it is gradually, and by moving through the sequence, that we come to understand that Ribeira is not after an obvious truth or the simple transcription of observable fact, nor is she there to “bear witness” first for herself and then for us. Instead, her pictures describe a reality that has been heightened, one made comic at times and tragic at others. They are observational and theatrical all at once, suffused with the inexplicable, even the ecstatic.
Legs and colourful trainers. King Square Park, Bristol, UK (2018) from the series Subida al Cielo (Ascent into Heaven) © Lua Ribeira/Magnum Photos
Though nearly all of Ribeira’s work can be said to contain undertones that attest to her interest in the intermingling of the mythic and religious with the mundane and the ordinary, her project Las Visiones, made during holy week in Cordoba, Spain in 2019, takes the socially ritualized expression of faith as its ostensible subject while focusing more regularly on the conspicuous absence of the divine from everyday life. As with her Subida Al Cielo project, these pictures avoid showing acts of worship or forms of religious practice in any explicit sense. Instead, when and how we glean their relevance to the pictures happens in an oblique way, through inference and suggestion rather than straightforward documentation. People sleep, wait, pose and walk, and none of the behaviors in themselves are framed or described in a way that suggests a connection to the spiritual. And yet, these scenes of familiar activities carry at least a trace of the uncanny due in no small part to their sequencing (we cannot trust what is plainly given in the wake of the pictures from Subida Al Cielo). Such an effect is not only the result of context or sequence; Ribeira frames scenes and captures details that trouble our interpretive certainty, as with the picture of a man crossing the street–from the right of the frame to the left–with a cigarette in his mouth and a complex chain of smoke trailing behind him. A nearby building provides an almost blank background to his body and closes off the composition and compresses space, giving us little else to contemplate beyond the man himself. Though the smoke is surely the product of his cigarette, there still remains something non-literal about its form, and it seems as though it appeared ready-made for Ribeira and already full of metaphoric potential.
Los Jetones. Puente Genil, Andalusia, Spain. Holy Week (2019) from the series Las Visiones (The Visions) © Lua Ribeira/Magnum Photos
The non-literal and non-explicit in Ribeira’s photographs, those details or atmospheric effects which go beyond the conventional boundaries of documentary photography, are in productive tension precisely with the capacity of her pictures to function as documents in the first place. Rather than focus on the psychology of her subjects or the social worlds they inhabit, at least overtly, Ribeira more often seems to focus on creating a psychological tone or generating a descriptive effect that will essentially transfigure her subjects into archetypes. In all five of the projects included in this book, and in nearly every photograph that comprises them, there is a relentless, nearly electric push and pull between the image as document and construction, or between each subject’s existence as fact and idea. We are always meant to see at least two worlds, two realities, in each picture.
Picnic in the garden. Esclavas de la Virgen Dolorosa, Covas, Galicia, Spain (2018) from the series Aristóratas (Aristocrats) © Lua Ribeira/Magnum Photos
For Aristócratas Ribeira made pictures over a two-year period, from 2016-2018, at a religious institution in Galicia that provides care to a community of women with cognitive disabilities. Though her affinity with Diane Arbus is plain enough to see, Ribeira does comparatively little to emphasize or exaggerate the relative strangeness and difference of this social environment. The visual and psychological character of these women (and a few men) is expressed as much through their gestures and the ways Ribeira frames them within the landscape as it is through a more straightforward approach to portraiture, of which there is some. For as many pictures that show us structured events or gatherings, there are just as many that function as emotional and psychological fragments of a given subject’s interior world. Rather than investigate the institution itself–its successes or shortcomings, its capacity for care or lack thereof–Ribeira instead describes daily textures and emotions of the people living both within and outside of its control. The primary relationship that the sequence creates is not, as we might expect, between the administrative presence of the institution and the women it cares for, but between the women and landscape they live within, one of placid beauty and formal simplicity.
In bed covering her ears. Esclavas de la Virgen Dolorosa, Covas, Galicia, Spain (2016) from the series Aristóratas (Aristocrats) © Lua Ribeira/Magnum Photos
Any possibility that the landscape might continue to function as a foil to a social environment, or as a source of relative calm, even of tranquility, is entirely absent for the remaining two series in the book, La Jungla and Los Afortunados. The pictures in La Jungla were made along the border separating Mexico and the United States as part of a larger collective project on migration by several Magnum photographers. Working only in a park in Tijuana where a section of the border wall passes through, Ribeira made many pictures that have about them the tone we might expect from work made in such a politically charged location: pictures brimming with anxiety and tension–trapped bodies and distressed faces, ominous seascapes and desolate urban spaces–and which attest to the precarious relationship the subjects have to their immediate environment. These familiarly dramatic pictures are sequenced together with those that emphasize the religious and divine within the texture of everyday life, even in moments of suffering and distress. Invoking themes of martyrdom and sacrifice, she nearly transfigures human subjects into religious icons though without also removing them from a world we can still materially understand and see as our own. Their gestures are given an archetypal quality that implies a narrative and thematic scope that extends well beyond the specific world within the picture Ribeira has made of them. The strange and concentrated effect of this sequence–which with ten pictures is the smallest in the book–results largely from the combination of these two starkly different dramatic and symbolic registers.
With eyes shut, hood and knit cap. Tijuana, Mexico (2019) from the series La Jungla (The Jungle) © Lua Ribeira/Magnum Photos
Los Afortunados, the most recent body of work in the book, can be understood as an elaboration of what Ribeira created in the La Jungla project. Once again she worked within a landscape defined by the politics of migration, this time between Morocco and Spain during the years 2019-20 that saw an increase in young people trying to navigate the danger of crossing the border into Spain. Though they conclude the book and benefit from the cumulative effect of what has preceded them (we grab hold of their compositions and engage with their dramatic situations quickly and with ease), these pictures break new ground for Ribeira for the way they resist being confined by the thematic categories that were used to such great effect in earlier series. Instead, they remain firmly grounded in the human drama she was there to witness and document. Portraits, group scenes and pictures that capture dramatic action might still invite an archetypal or metaphysical interpretation, but if they do it is not the end point or limit of the picture. Now, they more regularly inhabit uncertainty, ambiguity and contradiction, though never at the expense of the formal rigor or strange and alluring beauty so typical of Ribeira’s work.
In a picture towards the end of the sequence three young men work together to lift up a fourth by his arms and legs. His outstretched limbs, direct address to the camera and the resignation in his disposition recall a scene of Christ and his disciples after the descent from the cross. Though the picture seems constructed, or at least the result of some degree of collaboration between Ribeira and these young men, its symbolic effect remains undiminished just as its overall complexity is not bounded by its symbolism. In the back right of the frame, sun-lit and gazing over his shoulder and out of frame, sits a fifth young man seemingly unbothered or uninvolved in the dramatic action unfolding before him. His presence subtly undermines the symbolic orientation and mannered quality of the picture as a whole–he reintroduces the contingency of the world around them and out which this picture is made.
Lifted up. Settat, Morocco (2019) from the series Los Afortunados (The Fortunate Ones) © Lua Ribeira/Magnum Photos
Carried by the group. Settat, Morocco (2019) from the series Los Afortunados (The Fortunate Ones) © Lua Ribeira/Magnum Photos
Back bridge. Beni Ansar, Morocco (2019)
from the series Los Afortunados (The Fortunate Ones)
© Lua Ribeira/Magnum Photos