J. R. Plaza Archive

Artist's book

In 2003, Mexican artist Iñaki Bonillas introduced the photographic archive belonging to his grandfather, José Rodríguez Plaza, into his work. Its content which, since that time, has undergone a wide range of operations, has permitted him to combine elements that seemed, a priori, incompatible: on the one hand, a personal, biographical narrative, consisting of anecdotes and rather personal character notes; and, on the other, a quasi-scientific sense of compilation and classification.

The book “J.R. Plaza Archive” sets out to assemble a series of theoretical and literary digressions by an equal number of writers, philosophers, and poets, on 20 of the works that Bonillas has created from the material of this archive: a vast collection of images that appears to have awakened in the artist a need to explore the possibility of ultimately exhausting all its combinations and variants.

The book is conceptualized, then, as a kind of catalogue raisonné that ranges from the very first attempts, where the artist dealt with the diverse ways in which the pages of the more than 30 albums that comprise the archive (and which trace, without even intending to, a little history of photography of the 20th century) could be displayed; to the most recent exercises, in which the images have lost their familial nature in order to become starting points for a broader reflection about the various uses of photography, and the transmissibility of the archive.

The publication is part of the series of artists’ projects edited by Christoph Keller.