Gomma Photography Grant 2023
Remember When You Loved Me?
Photographer
Victor Cobo
Remember When You Loved Me?
23 Feb, 2024
When I was 4 my parents divorced. My father was a heroin addict. The relationship was abusive and my mother fled with me back to Spain. Eventually my father sobered up, left Florida, and retreated back to Kentucky. Sadly, he is now so sick that he has become a bitter and eccentric recluse. As a child I was sent to visit him during summer breaks from school in California. Each day he would insist that we go out and take photographs of me. Years later I realized that the pictures were illustrations of an imaginary relationship. The last time I saw him was twenty years ago. His mother had passed away and I had gone to her funeral in Kentucky. To my surprise he was still obsessed with our “imaginary” relationship. This delusion had become his secret universe. In most of the pictures he had around his house, I was not smiling: proof that even as a child, I knew this ‘relationship’ was real. The pictures were fiction. Thus, photography has become my therapy. I am intrigued by life’s dark curiosities. Transfixed, my father’s gifts are an ambiguous burden of vast weight. They are what I have; what has me.
About the photographer
Victor Cobo
Victor Cobo was born in 1971 to a Spanish mother and an American father. His autobiographical photographs explore lurid and playful melodramas that address the primal mysteries of sex, birth, death, damnation, and salvation. His deepest unspoken concern is the nature of reality itself. Cobo is a self-taught photographer who draws inspiration from Surrealism, Film Noir, and German Expressionism. Repeated visits to The Museo del Prado in Spain with his taxi-driving grandfather and seeing midnight thrillers in Florida with his father as a child changed his life. In 2007 his works were included in “Masters of American Photography” at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art with William Eggleston, Robert Frank, and Lee Friedlander. In 2010 Cobo’s works were included in “Hauntology” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, alongside such artists as Francisco de Goya, Francis Bacon, and Diane Arbus. The exhibition was curated by Scott Hewicker and Lawrence Rinder. In 2016 a book of his work titled Exit Pleasure was published by L’Artiere Editions in Italy. The forward was written by world-renowned photographer Larry Fink.
