#29| Home As Constant Negotiation

On seeking the invisible and the weight of memory with J.M. Ramirez Suassi

I’m happy to kick off the New Year with a conversation we had during the final days of 2025 with JM Ramirez-Suassi.

He is a Spanish photographer whose work I have long appreciated, and who has recently published a body of work that deeply challenges our perception of permanence. What moved me about his work is this continuous searching in the world that surrounds us.

A dance between harsh and magical.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy the conversation and collection of images. Words and photos are from his work.

1/ You come from a background outside of photography. How was your initial approach to the medium, and what was it about it that finally allowed you to express things that other languages couldn't?

JM: Yes, I came from the world of painting, but it cannot be said that painting is foreign to photography, since both are devoted to framing something. The fact is that photography gradually began to infiltrate my painting until the latter disappeared. The camera offered me an immediacy and a precision that painting could no longer give me at that moment. It was not only about recording reality, but about confronting it. Photography allowed me to work with time, with the trace of the real, with what happens in front of the lens and cannot be repeated in the same way. While painting demanded a slow construction, mediated by the hand and by matter, photography placed me before an instantaneous, almost ethical decision: when to look, when to stop, when to frame. In a way, photography gives you the same rhythm as life because it does not allow drafts.

Moreover, I discovered that I could say things through photography that other languages did not allow me to say, precisely because of its ambiguity.

The photographic image appears objective, but in reality it is loaded with choices, with silences and absences. That tension between what is shown and what is hidden strikes me as intensely fertile. Over time I have understood that I have not completely abandoned painting, but rather transferred its questions—about space, light, composition, and the gaze—to another medium that better fits my concerns.

Photography encompasses all languages, and perhaps the one it encompasses most is sculpture, even though it may seem implausible. When I take a photograph, I do not imagine the result as an image, but as a sculpture. I do not think about the final rectangle or its flat surface, but about the weight it would have if it could be held in the hands. The camera then ceases to be an optical instrument and becomes a carving tool.

Within the frame already lies the sculptor’s gesture, deciding where the body ends and where the void begins. This was precisely what, many years ago now, led me to put down the brushes and pick up a camera. Even today, a friend will occasionally ask me why I stopped painting. With irony, I always answer the same way: I no longer want to dirty my hands in this world unless it’s to wipe my ass. And I say this with great respect for painting. It is rare that one of my series does not contain some reference to painting.

2/ There is a quote from John Berger that reminds me of your work: “A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn’t the truth either. It’s more like a fleeting, subjective impression... while recording what has been seen, it always and by its nature refers to what is not seen. It isolates, preserves, and presents a moment taken from a continuum.”
In your images, I see suggestions rather than absolute truths. When you look back at a body of work like Malparaíso or Fordlândia 9, how were you able to find the emotional balance between what you chose to show and what you chose to keep away?

JM: Berger is always an inspiration—thank you for mentioning him.

Looking back, I think balance was never a prior calculation, but rather a consequence of listening long before photographing. In Malparaíso and Fordlândia 9 I understood quite early on that I was not there to explain a place or to “reveal” a truth, but to inhabit a sensation between what the territory offers and what resists being said.

What I decide to show almost always arises from a bodily, visual intuition. There are images that ask to take root, and others that, even if they are “good,” feel invasive or overly conclusive. Those latter ones usually stay out. Not out of modesty, but out of distrust toward the image that closes meaning too quickly. I am more interested in photography that opens a question than in photography that answers one.

In Malparaíso, for example, the gesture was to work through drift and fragmentation. The place, although nonexistent as a geographical point—in other words, imagined—already carried a strong narrative load—historical, political, symbolic—and any attempt at frontalness turned it into illustration. So I opted for photographs that evoked. What remains outside is just as important as what appears, because that void activates the viewer; it forces them to complete the image from their own memory or discomfort.

Fordlândia 9 was different, but the dilemma was similar. There, the weight of the myth was enormous. Showing too much meant reaffirming an already familiar narrative: ruin, failure, exoticism. The emotional balance lay in deromanticizing without stripping away mystery. Choosing not to photograph certain obvious icons was a form of respect, but also a strategy to let the place breathe without becoming trapped in its own legend.

In both cases, what I kept out is not a secret I hide, but a space I yield. I deeply believe that an image should not say everything. When a photograph becomes too eloquent, it leaves little room for the experience of the other. I prefer it to function like a crack or an escape: something that suggests, that unsettles slightly, that cannot be exhausted in a single reading.

In the end, that emotional balance resembles an act of restraint more than one of affirmation. Photographing, for me, is not about possessing the visible, but quite the opposite—possessing the invisible. Though in this, I am sure many photographers would disagree with me.

3/ I’m a big fan of your journaling paired with contact sheets. It feels to me as if you are laying down stones for a memory that is still incredibly fragile. Could you tell me about the relationship between the written word and the image in your process?

JM: Contact sheets function as a kind of testing ground for memory. They are not only an archive of the “before choosing,” but the record of a sustained doubt. There, the image has not yet become an icon; it remains probing, repetition, error. Words then enter not to explain the photograph, but to accompany it in its fragility, to admit what I no longer remember clearly, what has already begun to shift or be lost.

Writing near the images—not about them—allows me to accept that all memory is provisional. Words fix an emotion, a suspicion, a minimal context; the image, by contrast, resists, keeps looking back from another time. When I bring them together in my notebooks, I am not seeking coherence but a kind of echo. Characters, places, and motifs appear, disappear, and reappear just when I thought I had forgotten them.

Perhaps that is why you speak of “placing stones.” I like to think of it that way: small markers in unstable terrain. Not to build a monument, but not to lose the path back entirely, even knowing that this return will never be exact. Writing points; the image doubts. It is in that tension that my work begins to breathe.

Once, a photographer told me he had many doubts when choosing an image. I told him that this was a blessing, that doubting was the best thing he could do.

I always remember an Arab proverb that fits a photographer perfectly: He who does not doubt does not look; he who does not look does not see; he who does not see is blind.

Therefore, doubting is the best thing a photographer can do if they do not want to go blind.

4/ In your work, there is always more questioning than answering. Project Home is a search for a definition that perhaps doesn't exist. How has your own vision of "home" shifted through your years of wandering and photographing? Are there specific questions you think we should be asking ourselves to get closer to the truth of what home is for us?

JM: For a long time, I thought of home as a place one returns to, as Ulysses did. A fixed point. But home is not so much a place as a constant negotiation between the body, time, and memory. When Ulysses returns from his travels, only his dog, the old Argos, recognizes him. Today I think of home more as a fragile state than as a structure—something that appears and disappears. What is happening in Palestine should open anyone’s eyes.

Questions? I think we could ask quite a few: What parts of ourselves need to feel safe for a space to become habitable? How much of what we call home depends on other bodies, on other presences? What are we willing to lose—or leave behind—in order to call something home?

Perhaps we should also ask which memories we actively sustain and which we allow to fall away. If home is a place of belonging, what do we really belong to: a territory, a language, a shared history, or a version of ourselves that no longer exists?

Wandering and photographing have not brought me closer to an answer, but they have brought me to a partial certainty: home is not found; it is sought.

I have a series I have never shown called Uterus or Invisibility, in which I tried to dismantle the idyllic images often projected onto the house and onto permanence within it: a place where, materially, one should be able to trace one’s own identity. This is what is expected—or feared—depending on the case. But being at home, most of the time, is something very different, almost more foreign than being a foreigner abroad. Curiously, it is the only one of my series to which I have never been able to give an ending or maintain a constant follow-up. For a reason, no doubt.

You can discover more of J.M. Ramirez’s work via Instagram, Substack, and his personal website.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Until the next one,
Much Love