Reflections of a Soul

This work began with a simple observation while visiting the Hard Rock Café in Buenos Aires.

Behind the bar, rows of drinking glasses hung upside down, waiting for the next customer. One glass caught my attention because of the way light passed through its transparent surface.

Years later, while revisiting photographs from different periods of my life, I remembered a portrait I had made of a friend in Florida. Her eyes carried an expression that remained with me.

Bringing the two photographs together was never intended as a digital effect for its own sake.

It was an attempt to explore whether something that appears empty can still hold the presence of someone else.

Looking back, I realize I wasn't photographing a glass.

I was photographing the way memory fills empty spaces.

Reflections of a Soul blurs the boundary between documentary photography and visual interpretation.

The work combines images created in different places and at different moments, allowing memory to unite what geography and time had separated.

The transparent glass becomes a vessel for human presence, while the eyes introduce consciousness into an object ordinarily associated with emptiness.

The resulting composition suggests that absence is not always complete. People may continue inhabiting our memories long after they have left the room.

The foundation of this work began in 2009 at the Hard Rock Café in Buenos Aires.

Looking above the bar, I noticed rows of drinking glasses suspended upside down. The light reflecting through one of them made the object appear less like an ordinary glass and more like a transparent vessel waiting to hold something unseen.

Years later, I revisited the photograph while working with another image: a portrait of a friend made in Florida.

Her eyes seemed to answer the question suggested by the empty glass.

In 2012, the two photographs were combined into a single conceptual work.

The final composition became a conversation between memory, absence, presence, and the emotional meaning that photographs gather over time.

We often believe memories live only within us.

Yet a familiar object can suddenly return someone to our thoughts.

A glass.

A chair.

A doorway.

A photograph.

Perhaps memories do not live inside objects.

Perhaps objects simply help us discover the memories that were waiting within us all along.

Sometimes what appears empty still carries a presence.

Preserved as the eleventh accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Reflections of a Soul represents one of the collection's earliest explorations of conceptual photographic art.

By combining images created in different locations and years, the work demonstrates that photography can preserve not only visible reality but also emotional truth, memory, and imagination.