MARCELO VICENTE RACANA

Photography began for me as a kind of listening.
Not to people—but to the world, to things. At first, it wasn’t about art or aesthetics, but a way to make sense.

At a young age, I was forced to cross a threshold and ended up in a country where everything was foreign. Even silence felt unfamiliar. That’s when I found photography. Frame by frame, the world began to return, reshaped. Gradually, what was foreign became mine. Photography taught me to observe, to reduce, to search for what hides beneath the surface of the everyday.

The quiet gestures, the strange coincidences, the unnoticed arrangements of things that seem to ask for attention. The beauty and melancholy of time passing. I don’t always know what I’m looking for, but when something appears, I feel it before I can explain it. The photograph begins in that moment of tension, of recognition.

Photographs don’t freeze time. They allow something to resurface—some trace, some echo. A photograph isn’t just what was there; it’s also a record of presence, a witness to both the seen and the felt. I believe everything we see is a sign, waiting to be unveiled.

I’m self-taught as a photographer, and I’m still learning. Photography came first. Later came film. I spent years directing short films, documentaries, and television dramas. While many move from still images into film, I found myself going in the other direction—toward stillness, toward the immediacy of the photographic process. Toward what remains when movement stops.

My work shifts in form and subject. I often walk without a fixed destination. Something in the air, in the light, or in the arrangement of space makes me pause. I feel my way forward more than I plan it.

I was born in Argentina and now live in Stockholm. I studied film directing at the Swedish Film School. Today, my focus is fully on the photographic image.
Stillness. Light. Memory.
And what remains.