Jardin de mi padre

In 1980, Luis Carlos Tovar’s father, Jaime Tovar, was abducted by FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). The only evidence that he was still alive was a “proof of life” Polaroid sent by the group to Tovar’s family. That Polaroid acts as a prompt for his book Jardín de mi Padre, which offers a poetic, in-depth reflection on memory and the legacy of the past. Rather than a specific narrative rooted in photographic logic, the book weaves together a mixture of photographs, cyanotypes, and archival ephemera to create a disorienting but riveting visual essay that unfurls the medium in a generative and powerful way. “The journey one takes—whether in regard to memory, family, state violence, or trauma—is one that complicates and collapses our understanding of the past and present,” states Oluremi Onabanjo, “which is important for our understanding of what photobooks can do in 2020.”