Some words don’t have exact translations, as they encompass concepts whose range of meanings becomes narrowed or distorted in the shift from one language to another. “Transient” falls into this category. It refers to the transitory, the ephemeral, but it also designates people who stay for a limited time in specific places.

The word evokes the state of perpetual transit, both physical and spiritual, in which Geraldine Barón, an Argentine living in New York, a passerby in her own life, has found herself living for several years. “Waking up early and turning off the alarm. Packing the bags, unpacking the bags. Changing the time on the clock. Buenos Aires with layovers in Atlanta, Miami, Chicago. The airports, the cafés, the blue chairs, the escalators. Now it’s here, and here is for a while. But what happens to all this when I’m not there? How is it possible that all these places, all these people, continue to exist, even when we’re not where they are?”

Geraldine uses photography to capture memories and attempt to give meaning to the magma of sensations and affections that blur with time and distance. A detective of her own memories, she searches for "clues, evidence that everything happened, that it was once there, that it might still be here." In doing so, she uses photographic techniques that mimic the function of memory: “When recalling an event, one retains the images of the 'important' gesture but also of details, fragments, objects that are more witnesses to the experience than part of it.”

In Geraldine’s images, the framing outlines fragments. Bodies in different states of tension and fulfillment—twisted, loving, at rest, abandoned. Hands, bellies, backs, shoulders. The body and the affections that traverse it, sublimated by a gaze that is both intimate and respectful. Geraldine lets us witness particular moments of grace in which we simultaneously feel the joy and the anticipated nostalgia of the present moment. Her images speak of desire and fusion, while also of solitude and distance, building, in a pointillist way, the sensory narrative of an endless summer. Summertime… and the livin’ is easy… says the song, with infinite melancholy.

“Transient” speaks of the search for identity between two countries, between two ages, between youth and maturity, of the uncomfortable path of those who choose to travel their life without a fixed destination.

Sylvie Argerich
November 2014