Biography:

Ana Casas Broda was born in Granada, Spain in 1965. Of Austrian and Spanish origin. She grew up in both countries. She moved to Mexico in 1974 and has been a photographer since 1983. She participated in Pedro Meyer’s Monday Workshop. From 1990 to 1993, she organized exhibitions and workshops in the Photography area of Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid, Spain. From 1993 to 1998, she founded and coordinated the photography workshops of Centro del la Imagen in Mexico City. She has taken photography courses in Spain, Austria, New York and Mexico. She has imparted photography lectures and courses in Centro de la Imagen, The ARCO International Fair and other institutions. She has also been a juror in several photo contests. In 1998 she was the curator of the contemporary Mexican photo exhibition "Looking at the 90’s" in the Fotofest ’98 in Houston, Texas. She has made all sorts of photographic series and other projects including video and writing. Her work is focused on photography and memory. She’s had individual exhibits since 1991 in Spain, Austria, Germany and Mexico and since 1983, she’s participated in collective exhibits in Mexico, Austria, Spain, Italy, Finland, Canada, Czech Republic and England among others.
She published a photography book, "Album" in 2000 (Mestizo, Spain). This book had a feature exhibition that was shown in Centro de la Imagen in 2001 and in Casa de America in Spain in 2001. Between 2002 and 2006 she was the coordinator of FotoGuanajuato, which includes an annual photography studies program and, every two years, the FotoGuanajuato encounter. She is currently the tutor of the contemporary photography seminar of Centro de la Imagen.

Statement:

The pictures that my grandmother took of me in my childhood had a tremendous appeal for me, and every time I went to Vienna, I submerged myself into the photo albums as if they held the key to some mystery. I cannot distinguish between the photos and my memories, which I might have constructed based on the pictures. This work is the result of my need to find my own roots and identity. The process for this book was in many senses, an exploration. I went deep into my own dairies and my grandma’s and discovered that, once again, we are united by a profound necessity of capturing time in words, pictures, recordings, films, and videos. These objects allow us to see the full cycle of our lives. My grandma took pictures of me when I was a little girl, now I take photos of her just like she did with her mother before she died. The need that drove my grandma to take a self-portrait every year, reminds me of what drove me for so long to take pictures of myself and put them in scrapbooks.
ALBUM is built upon the relationship between me and my grandma and our bond through photography. The house and the body are the coordinates that structure it. Photography is the medium that allows fixing our gaze and letting everyone else in.