My name is Tabata Roja, I’m a photography student, I’m twenty-three years old and I live in Mexico City. I started being a self-taught photographer and about three years ago I started with formal studies on chemical photography.
All of my work is in film, in my stock there are always Ilford Hp5, Holga, Kodak and recently lomography. I am crazy about the idea of how the emulsion will react to certain conditions of light and processes of development. I can spend hours in a dark room.
For a little over a year and a half, my work has focused on eroticism and nudism, because these are issues that have disturbed me since I can remember. Since young I had a very large fixation for this two subjects, but it was not until relatively recently that I took my camera and began to explore them through it. I realized that eroticism, nudism and women have always been seen from a male point of view.
These photos, are, for me a search.
A search for eroticism from the point of view of a woman, the beauty of the naked body and the most important, to understand me and find me in each of my photographs. I seek the resignation of the naked body and the woman. A definitive rupture with the idea that the naked body always has a sexual implication and reconciliation with human forms in their most natural state.
During most of last year I concentrated on trying to emulate old photographs and paintings, but in the last months without realising it, I began to change the way I see things through the camera and to experiment with frames, processes of development and the way that took a photo, approaching one more step to the search of my own aesthetic.
I have recently begun to explore these issues without limiting myself to third parties, making self-portraits, in order to understand these issues in a much more intimate way and to discover myself in them.
My first set of self-portraits
I was recently reading Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes and between his lines I found the following words: “… and I wanted to deepen it not as a question (a subject), but as a wound, I see, I feel, then I notice , then I look and I think …”
Those lines stayed in my head for several days. After turning those words around I concluded that I could only express it through self-portraits (this is my first series of self-portraits), and one morning I took my tripod, I mounted the camera and I started shooting until I finished the film.
These photos are the result.
We are glad to share the words and images by Tabata Rojas, an amazing photographer from Mexico. You can check more of her at @tabataroja on instagram.
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