Main Influence: Rita Puig-Serra Costa

Rita Puig-Serra Costa is a spanish photographer who works in the publishing Terranova in Barcelona. After studying Humanities and an MA in Comparative Literature , she studied Graphic Design and Photography at IDEP in the CFD and Observatory .

Most memorably, her book ‘Where Mimosa Bloom’ deals with the grief she suffered following the death of her mother, Where Mimosa Bloom takes the form of an extended farewell letter; with photography skillfully used to present a visual eulogy or panegyric. This grief memoir about the loss of her mother is part meditative photo essay, part family biography and part personal message to her mother. These elements combine to form a fascinating and intriguing discourse on love, loss and sorrow. Rita’s connections with her family reflect a deeply personal insight into the life of herself, her relatives and her beloved mother who it mirrored throughout her photo book.

Screen Shot 2016-01-17 at 21.46.33 — The opening verse to ‘Where Mimosa Bloom’. This idea of a translated script of where Rita originates from indices a personal approach to her project. Her song words set the receiver up to her project. A verse of words at the beginning of my photo book may be a great start to creating a visual narrative, as the reader can follow on from where I left off. The set of images to the side mark the first sequence of media is that of Rita’s family tree, the three generations of her family to mark he change and transitions of death.

Rita’s Style

Rita’s fundamental idea of taking a detailed, vivid portraits and placing it on one side of the page, to then mirror an object reflecting that persons character is idyllic, it reflects a clear idea of personality and connection, making the reader instantly catch on to her family traits and commodities. Using objects of memorabilia and substance tells an abstract narrative for the receiver, they are invited in to celebrate the fortunes of those related to Rita’s mother.

Here is a link to Costa’s online E-Book of ‘Where Mimosa Bloom’: http://www.phasesmag.com/rita-puig-serra-costa/where-mimosa-bloom/#s-12

An article from ‘photo-eye’ indicates that:

“There aren’t any words on the book’s cover, just a detail of a faded snapshot of Puig-Serra Costa as a girl in her family’s light-dappled garden. This could indicate that it’s a book of photographs, but its intimate size is more akin to a literary work.”

Here is the link to the photo-eye article: http://blog.photoeye.com/2015/02/book-review-where-mimosa-bloom.html

Daniel Smith, the reviewer, continues to mention how Costa’s work revolves concisely around the themes of ‘memory’ and ‘transition’, fitting in nicely with the themes of my project. Rita’s work is highly symbolic, the mention of the dried tree at the beginning of the book, a still life of a dried mimosa branch from the same tree does appear later in the book, an indication, like title itself, of the tree’s symbolism. Puig-Serra Costa combined these and other images with memorabilia to create a lyrical visual elegy to her mother, Yolanda Costa Rico (1959-2008).