I realized this project in 2011, through a reflection about my mindset of a new arrived in Mexico City. I should create ghosts so I used a flash unit to achieve it. After the publication of that mini project I started to ser a lot of street photographers replying my technique.
Reality Remade is a reaction of my condition in that moment. I was arrived in Mexico City a year before and after that I still felt myself as a total stranger in town. In October 2011 I worked 3 weeks in Los Angeles where I met a lot of talented photographers and that experience was fundamental to me.
I returned from the United States with a lot of energy and a new spirit, above all full of ideas that I wanted to implement. I bought a Yongnuo 560 flash and despite I loved the use of flash on the street watched in the work of Bruce Golden my intention was just to have an experience with the flash for my street shots. I absolutely had to avoid imitating him. 1/30, 1/60, sometimes even 1/15 and the use of flash. It is a technique that has something random on the results and I was just experimenting while I was working. Experimenting just like still happens to me because I never want to stay in my comfort zone. This is how I learned a lot with photography.
Madero Avenue is a street very busy, which leads you to the Zocalo, the most important square in the center of Mexico City. I watched all these people pass in front of me and then disappear. People I didn’t know and who I probably wouldn’t see again in my life. It was like the life and death. You appear at a certain point and then disappear, just like everyone of us. I understood how that idea could be a theme of a project and the flash unit could be a fantastic tool to realize it: by creating ghosts on the street I could give to the viewer the sensation of ghosts, as existences of the past that appeared, spirits who still inhabited the city, continuing to animate it in their wanderings.
It was a project different from what you expect when it comes to Street Photography. It was my project. I was photographing the reality but playing with it, in order to propose a reflection that was completely personal, born from an inner feeling. It also does not happen or at least I had never seen it applied to street photography to tell about a theme that does not speak only of life but also of death.
You can read also some backstage considerations about the project on my blog:
https://alexcoghe.com/journal/reality-remade-story-of-a-street-photography-project