Ría

Ria is the feminine version of the word “rio,” meaning “river.” The term also describes the area where a freshwater river or stream meets the ocean.

The book Ria is composed of a series of etchings created in response to photographs I took in the summer of 2013. During a journey with my daughter, the anthropologist Ruthie Talmor, through the Deep South of the United States—Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee—we traced the early footsteps of Elvis Presley at the beginning of his path to fame.

The book is bilingual (English and Spanish) and is accompanied by a detailed travel diary written by Ruthie, along with texts by various scholars and writers.

At the outset of the journey, our guide was the detailed volume by Peter Guralnick and Ernst Jorgensen, the biographer and researcher of Elvis Presley: Elvis Day by Day. We met, spoke with, edited, and recorded interviews with devoted fans, close acquaintances, and passing strangers. In the background resonated a question: How do the winds of the past continue to blow in the present? How does myth converse with reality? How does the private existence of one individual shape—and in turn reshape—culture and its fabric?

From the 1,311 photographs I took, I created nineteen small photogravure etchings and eighteen medium-format photogravures. The small prints document the stations of the journey, serving as markers and signposts. The search for the present-absent lends the larger etchings a range of sensations: wonder, longing for the unknown, for what has been absorbed into the past yet continues to flicker in memory.