Patricio Reig is an Argentine-born photographer, writer and visual artist whose practice moves between photography, literature, history and material experimentation. Trained in architecture in Bogotá and later completing a master’s degree focused on modernism in Catalonia, he has developed a highly personal approach to photography rooted in both historical research and contemporary artistic practice.
Reig works under the name Patricio Reig in photography and has long been interested in early photographic processes such as wet collodion, ambrotype and daguerreotype. Rather than treating photography as a purely reproducible medium, he approaches each image as a physical object, allowing chemical reactions, imperfections, texture and traces of manual intervention to remain visible in the finished work.
Much of his work centres on portraiture and the human figure, but the image is rarely presented as a conventional portrait. Reig often fragments, folds, stitches, tears or layers the photographic surface, exploring the idea that a portrait can simultaneously represent an individual and a larger, more complex construction of memory and identity. As he has described it, each fragment can also contain a whole, and each image can be opened, closed, broken apart and reconstructed without losing its essence.
This concern with material transformation is especially visible in the analogue works for which he is best known. Many are printed on paper that has been treated manually with coffee and chemical processes, producing subtle variations in tone, texture and surface. The process is entirely handmade, meaning that even works within the same small edition can retain an individual physical character.
Reig’s practice also extends beyond conventional photographic paper. Across different bodies of work he has used Hahnemühle paper, plexiglass, pinhole photography and mixed analogue-digital techniques, continually exploring the boundary between photograph and object.
Series such as Verso Reverso demonstrate this approach particularly clearly. Begun from an interest in photographing figures from behind, the series shifts attention away from direct confrontation with the camera and instead explores the act of being seen. The works also became a space for Reig to develop his large-format printing techniques and his treatment of the photographic surface as a physical material.
Alongside photography, Reig has maintained a longstanding engagement with literature. He comes from a literary family and is a direct descendant of Colombian writer Jorge Isaacs, author of María (1867). Reig has also written poetry and fiction, including the novel Un hombre que hacía retratos. This literary background is reflected in the quiet narrative quality and sense of memory that runs throughout his photographic work.
Patricio Reig has exhibited internationally in Spain, Italy, Argentina, the United States and elsewhere. Selected exhibitions include presentations in Milan, Barcelona, Girona and Stockholm, as well as his exhibition with The PhotoGallery in Halmstad in 2020.
The PhotoGallery has continued to work closely with Reig and his evolving practice, including later bodies of work such as Verso Reverso. His photography occupies a distinctive place between image, object and memory, where the physical act of making remains as important as the subject being photographed.
