Maturity

Photographer Gaal D. Cohen worked closely with the indigenous Otomi community in San Pablito, Mexico. Witnesses/Testigos is an exhibition that comes from the friendship, interaction and dialogue between artist, artisan and community. Each finished artwork is a fusion of ancestral art: the digital photograph, and the amate paper on which it is printed. Cohen has documented the eleven stages of the human life cycle, with ten years in between each portrait. Each photograph is printed on amate paper made by Don Genaro Fuentes Trejo, an Otomi artisan papermaker who creates the paper in the traditional ways first used by his ancestors.

This is the fifth image. In it, a mature adult is staring at the camera, with eyes wide open and a slightly furled brow. They are not smiling.