Silence in the Attic
The book Sucedió entre dos párpados, by the Spanish photographer Juan Manuel Castro Prieto, follows the imagination of a child between reality and the subconscious.
By Gaia Squarci. Photographs by Juan Manuel Castro Prieto.
When Castro Prieto was a child, the moment of the siesta, when adults took a nap after lunch, became an occasion for him to explore the attic of his family home. Upstairs, silence shaped a world of objects that carried traces of human presence.
The title, which translates into “It Happened Between Eyelids”, evokes the moments when vision sharpens because one is following intuition, rather than relying solely on sight to interpret reality.
In the photographs, sculptures, objects, and human figures hold equal weight. Symbols drawn from Christian iconography and pagan traditions, tied to life and death, appear throughout the sequence. The photographer looks both as the child he once was, attempting to decipher these signs, and as the adult who returns to his origins, assessing his distance from them.
He quotes the writer Juan José Millás: “Whoever was cold as a child will be cold for the rest of their life, for the coldness felt in childhood never disappears.”
The book Sucedió entre dos párpados is published by Ediciones Anómalas and available for 30 Euro.
