Ana Mercado
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Esperándote con ansia is a photographic series that explores the beginning of romantic grief from the perspective of a male protagonist. The images are set at the moment of farewell, when a relationship has ended yet continues to inhabit the body and memory. The project reflects on waiting, desire, and vulnerability as they surface in this suspended moment, where the goodbye remains unspoken and touch becomes a final attempt at holding on.
Con el diario del lunes narrates the brief life of a character shaped by losses, loves, and silences. Through an intimate visual narrative, the project reflects on delayed maturity: the understanding of lived experience when it can no longer be altered, but can be revisited with renewed awareness.
In what way does your personal history intertwine with photography?
Photography and my personal history are not two separate paths—they are the same journey. Everything I create is born from lived experiences, from emotions I am still trying to decipher, from moments that left a mark on me. Photography functions as my way of processing what moves through me. When an idea or a theme appears, it is never accidental; it emerges because something inside me shifted, broke, or transformed. In that sense, photography is my way of interpreting life with hindsight.
I work extensively with repetition because emotions are not linear. I return to the same concept from different perspectives because each new gaze reveals something different. The image forces me to look again, to revisit, to question. In that process, layers unfold—memories, contradictions, fragments. Repetition is not an aesthetic device; it is a way of insisting on what I still don’t fully understand. At the same time, it seeks compassion from its viewer.
The dream emerges because memory works that way for me: fragmented, mixed with desire, fear, and things that never happened but could have. Through the dreamlike, I can dramatize a memory or soften a wound; I can amplify an emotion or re-signify it. I am not interested in representing reality as it was, but rather how it felt. My works are emotional reconstructions rather than objective representations. That is why I say my history and my photography are intertwined: what I feel becomes an image.
My creative process always begins with two fundamental forces: a clear emotion and a title. The title is the thread’s loose end—it allows me to pull and begin unraveling the knot. I need to find it before moving forward because it sets the emotional tone, the symbolic weight, and the overall direction of the project. If the title doesn’t appear, the work feels scattered; once it does, everything begins to organize itself.
Once I have that starting point, I begin to think about who needs to inhabit the story. I don’t choose characters for their aesthetic qualities, but for what they represent within the narrative. I ask myself what kind of body that emotion requires, what type of presence can sustain it, how it moves within the frame. For me, the body in photography is the first narrator—it speaks even what remains unsaid.
Then I enter a deeply sensory process: I mentally revisit places I have stored away. I have an internal archive of locations that caught my attention because of their atmosphere. When developing a project, I imagine these spaces inhabited by the characters I have already defined. I see how the light falls on them, how they breathe within the space, what tensions emerge. I think about dialogue—what they say to each other and why. I return to conversations that stayed with me because of their emotional weight, sketching them out while trying to recall the speaker’s tone of voice.
Finally, I pour everything into a storyboard. I don’t approach it rigidly, but rather as an emotional map. I think about shots, angles, movements, always leaving room for what might appear in the moment. The storyboard allows me to see the sequence as an internal film. It’s the moment when I understand what I want to tell and how I want the viewer to move through that experience. It’s a mix of organized intuition and sensitive structure.
I like to imagine the silent dialogue between the work and the person who looks at it. I don’t think about a general audience, but about the original addressee of the work: the muse. That figure can be a he, a she, or a they; someone who passed away, someone no longer part of my present, or a presence that left a mark that is hard to erase. It isn’t necessarily a romantic relationship, but an emotional intensity strong enough to move something within me and activate the need to create.
At the same time, each work leaves a message for my future self. It’s a way of giving myself clues, of helping myself understand or reread life processes when I encounter those images again. As if the photographs were letters sent forward in time. I wonder what impact the work would have on that inspiring figure—whether it might affect them, reopen a shared wound, be rejected, or leave something resonating within them. The recipients shift, disappear, and return transformed. The work becomes a bridge between different times, versions, and memories.
A professor once spoke about the “art of the unsaid,” and that idea marked me deeply. I am interested in working with everything that remained unspoken, with what was said too much, with what was misunderstood. My characters act as carriers of these multiple perspectives: each one holds a fragment of a conversation that was never fully resolved. I like to imagine my sequences as constructing a small multiverse of meanings, where emotions can coexist without needing to be fully explained.
Building photographic narratives enriches the process and clarifies the message. A single image breathes on its own, but when I organize images into a sequence, they acquire a broader, almost cinematic meaning. Telling a fragment of a story is a way of accompanying the viewer, of offering a possible path so they can enter my emotional world without getting lost. It’s my way of reaching out and saying: I’ll think it through for both of us.
What importance does being a young artist hold for you today?
Honestly, I don’t spend much time thinking about what it means to be a “young artist.” I don’t experience it as an identity or a title, but as a state. I believe anyone could create if they felt the need or impulse, so I don’t feel special for doing so. For me, the merit of creation lies in honesty.
If I had to define being a young artist, it would be about coexisting with the constant challenge of learning while doing. I am still in formation and don’t have all the answers, but perhaps that is precisely what’s valuable: creating from a place of transition, experimentation, and searching. I’m not interested in speaking on behalf of anyone else. What matters to me is being able to use this stage of life as raw material. If being a young artist means anything to me, it’s working from emotional urgency and allowing that to be visible. The work ultimately becomes a record of how I am learning.
Yes, absolutely, because these are themes that continue to shape my life. My projects speak about desire, love, friendships, farewells, and that in-between space of adolescence and youth where everything feels heightened. These are processes I am still living through, and that’s why they return again and again in my images not because I want to repeat them, but because they are still alive.
Romantic experience, in many ways, was what pushed me the most to grow. The need to be worthy of someone, to be better, to mature earlier, caused certain emotions to surface out of sync with time. Understanding that each person experiences time differently can be frustrating, because we always want stories to align. That desire to love, to connect, to imagine a possible future became almost an instinctive reflex. Sometimes photography is the only way I can calm that anxiety, to create a happily ever after.
Processes of maturation are also very present, as suggested by the phrase ‘faltan cinco para el peso’. It becomes a mixture of nostalgia, learning, and revision. I believe all of this defines my creative process because, ultimately, it defines who I am at this moment in life. I photograph in order to understand what is happening to me, and to explain to myself why I continue to desire so intensely.
My generation grew up amid constant change: relationships that shift quickly, identities that transform, futures that feel uncertain, a life that moves faster than we can process. Creating within that context inevitably leaves its mark on our work.
I don’t think we have a different answer to the world, but we do have a different way of looking at it. We are not searching for certainty; we work from doubt, from transition, from what has not yet been resolved. Perhaps that is what makes young art distinctive: it does not aim to be definitive, perfect, or closed. It allows itself to show fragility, instability, and the things we are still trying to understand. And in a world full of change, that honesty can become a form of resistance. Creating from that place is, in itself, a perspective.
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