The Repeated Image (2019)

Miguel Rózpide works with found images borrowed from a family archive that he discovered back in 2020.

This archive belonged to his grandfather and contains more than four-thousand images that range from silver gelatine prints to colour slides. All this images were taking during the sixties and seventies in different countries such as Spain, United States or Germany.

Appropriating these photographic materials, he investigates memory and the logic of the archive, as well as questions authorship and objectivity. Using an encyclopaedic approach and a quasi- scientific precision, he applies specific combinations and manipulations, to create different narratives and contexts. The main red threat within this project is the research for underlying patterns and links between the found images.


Rather than focusing on what the actual image shows, The Repeated Image plays with the classification system used by his grandfather in order to archive them, including numbers and sidenotes written on the back of the images or the 35mm slides.

By using this existent patterns, Miguel Rózpide creates sequences of images, numbers and words that weren’t supposed to be together, creating this way, new narratives in an almost absurd poetic way. A tension is build between repetition and variation. Associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image. Using this ever-growing archive of found documents, his works questions the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture.