An Archive in the Making: An Interview with Diana Guerra
Diana Guerra’s Fleeting Under Light. Seaton Street Press. Copyright © Diana Guerra, 2024.
‘We have changed greatly’
Boys are now men
loaded with history,
of character.
What hurts is that perhaps
I will not get to know them as they are,
and what they will be like?
Perhaps I will move further away,
perhaps they will,
or perhaps the two sides will drift so far apart
that they will meet again.
-Diana Guerra, Fleeting Under Light
Peruvian photographer Diana Guerra’s photobook Fleeting Under Light, produced by the publishing house Seaton Street Press, uses a risograph printing method to create a subtle and astonishing connection between a Latinx immigrant artist and the everyday lives and memories of the families that long for their past as they assimilate into United States territory. To explore the potential of this book, I spoke toGuerra to learn about the perspective of the Latin American essence of the project.
Intervenxions staff edited this interview for concision and clarity.
Diana Guerra’s Fleeting Under Light. Seaton Street Press. Copyright © Diana Guerra, 2024.
Given the actual circumstances and conditions for the Latinx Community in the U.S., I thought it was important to give you and the people you portray a voice for the readers to get closer to a project that has very much to do with the memory, the identity, and the everyday life of a Latinx community spread between the U.S. and Latin America. I wanted to start asking you about the people you portrayed and their connection to you as a Peruvian artist living in the U.S. Who are they, and why was it important for you to create specific portraits using anthotypes?
This project started as a photographic exploration shortly after I immigrated to the U.S. and was reconnecting with my relatives back in Peru. While struggling to adjust to a new environment, my camera naturally gravitated toward what felt most comfortable to me or what reminded me of home. I photographed my coworkers—mostly immigrants from Guatemala—as we shared our stories and dreams in this new land.
In its early stages, I didn’t have much clarity about what the project meant or what it would become over time. It was driven mainly by an urgency to find comfort—moments where I could rest and feel at ease with others. The camera became an excuse to gather, to make our time together feel special after long hours of work in the service industry. We were creating a photographic record of our growing bonds while each of us would build a new life and sense of self in this country. I came to understand with this project that we were (and still are) an archive in the making.
During that time, I had begun my graduate studies in photography at Parsons School of Design and organized a trip to Peru to visit and photograph my relatives. Something particular about that trip, and others that followed, was my focus on my mother’s side of the family, who live in the northern region of Piura. This area has less Western influence compared to the capital, Lima, and maintains a stronger connection to our Indigenous roots.
I also revisited my personal archives and digitized photographs that I felt were “proof” of my Peruvian identity while reflecting on this. Several questions arose during those years: What felt essential to my identity? What were the roots of my sense of self and were these growing, transforming, migrating? Was “home: gone—or could I still find it somewhere? The whole process became a search for an identity that I thought I had lost while navigating displacement in the U.S.
The use of anthotype in the works was a process of experimentation that merged the ancestral organic dyeing techniques I learned in the Andean region of Cusco and purple corn, a plant commonly used in Peru to make traditional drinks and desserts. It felt significant to me that these portraits were printed using an organic material so deeply connected to my native land. Seeing my mother, cousins, and even myself reproduced in such a ghostly, ephemeral manner was mesmerizing, and truly captured a sentiment of being both present and absent at the same time.
Diana Guerra’s Fleeting Under Light. Seaton Street Press. Copyright © Diana Guerra, 2024.
Diana Guerra’s Fleeting Under Light. Seaton Street Press. Copyright © Diana Guerra, 2024.
Diana Guerra’s Fleeting Under Light. Seaton Street Press. Copyright © Diana Guerra, 2024.
Diana Guerra’s Fleeting Under Light. Seaton Street Press. Copyright © Diana Guerra, 2024.
Can you talk more about those anthotypes and the way they have been resonating with many of the decisions both Lindsay Buchman (the publisher) and you took when making the photobook? I am referring specifically to decisions concerning the types of paper, color of the papers and typography, and general layout of the photobook.
The majority of the works were made using purple corn as a light-sensitive emulsion for printing. Even though my initial interest stemmed from its presence in the everyday lives of Peruvian families, its significance extends far beyond my personal experience.
Corn is a cultural signifier for most Peruvians as it has held great importance in the South American Andes since pre-Hispanic times—it was even referred to as “oro” (gold) in Spanish or “sara”/“kulli sara” in Quechua. During my research for this project, I was struck to learn that purple corn was also cultivated in North American regions such as Yucatán, and in what is now U.S. territory by the Hopi and Navajo Indigenous tribes. This was a beautiful surprise as its ancestry extends to the land I’m currently occupying.
I’m grateful to have worked with Lindsay Buchman and Seaton Street Press on the production of this photobook as her knowledge and expertise were invaluable throughout the process. Lindsay and I worked collaboratively to produce the book, and we decided to integrate purple corn throughout its design as it was so significant in my body of work. Besides its presence in the original works—both as material and subject in the photographs and poetry—we incorporated its characteristics throughout the publication: from the cover design, metallic foil, and short poem sleeves to the violet-printed typography.
A poem you wrote that is included in the book, I guess, is a personal reflection on how migration changes our perception of time and our own identity. How would you describe this dialogue you have created between the Latinx Identity you are interrogating and the idea of a memory that needs to be worked on by putting in paper personal reflections, WhatsApp conversations, photographs and other materials you have included in your photobook?
The photographs and poems in this book challenge a linear view of time particular to the Western canon, and envision the past merging with the present instead. The poem “We have changed greatly” reflects on past moments I spent with my cousins in northern Peru while focusing on their present selves. It addresses the experience of encountering the obsolescence of their child forms while noticing novelty and transformation.
For those of us in the diaspora, these sentiments often coexist—we are constantly called to revisit our past and carry it in our present lives. This perspective aligns with decolonial theories that reclaim Indigenous temporalities, such as those found in Andean cosmology. Through this project, I came to understand that time can be experienced as spiraled or layered—an idea that resonates deeply within a postcolonial framework.
Likewise, “Texts from Home” was created with the intention of merging different geographic locations by including text messages from my mother—in both Spanish and English—intertwined with the MTA announcements you can hear on trains in NYC. The poem evokes the simultaneous presence of two places, and through their exchange, a third space is born.
Diana Guerra’s Fleeting Under Light. Seaton Street Press. Copyright © Diana Guerra, 2024.
In one of our previous conversations, you said that “memory can alter our perception of time and space and that the methods used for this project, Anthotype for the original works and Risography for the publication, have been able to support this understanding”. I would like you to go deeper into this idea. In general terms what does it mean to work on a fading and fragile memory and how is memory altering your perception of time and space in this specific project.
Something particular about the anthotype process is its ephemeral nature, which means that the works will fade over time. It’s also a process that requires great patience. During the winter, prints can take up to a month to develop under natural sunlight, and their color tones shift depending on various factors. Waiting for a print to develop feels like a ritual to bring the past into the present, to overcome the nostalgic feeling of recovering something that was lost, and to embrace identity and home as fluid and impermanent.
At the same time, the photographic decisions made prior to the anthotype process (selecting archival photographs or fragments of them, as well as the collaborative photoshoots with my relatives) serve as a reconstruction of the past, a remake of a sense of home and identity that feels intentional. By creating photographs that fade and cannot be preserved, I’m criticizing an obsession with archival permanence. My works evoque a memory that feels more embodied, material, vulnerable, and that exists outside institutional control.
The use of risography in the photobook introduced new qualities to the conversation in terms of the work’s materiality and its significance to decolonial ideas of time and space. Risography’s graininess, misregistration, and low fidelity felt like a good fit to reflect the nonlinearity and fluidity that my works evoque. I found it meaningful that the images could be fixed onto paper—offering viewers a private, tactile experience—while still retaining the aesthetic qualities of impermanence and vulnerability.
If Fleeting Under Light invokes the relationship of crossing borders and the transformational process that goes beyond one’s identity, involving new understandings of family and homelands, I wanted to know if you had the intention to establish a sort of collective voice of Latinx participants involved in this project. Is there such a collective voice and how did you and the publisher manage to go beyond what is personal to reach something that could have a social and political relevance?
Immigrants are not a monolith, and we all go through different experiences as part of this process. Even though this project is based on my personal journey as a Latinx immigrant in New York, my research extended beyond the personal. It gathered testimonials from other immigrants as well as engaged with literature and critical texts where I found decolonial and feminist perspectives that served as inspiration.
Lindsay and I chose to include the poem “We Are Not From Here, But Here We Are” as it speaks with a collective voice. The poem was written as an offering to those who managed to cross the U.S.-Mexico border and those who couldn't make it as well. It is a tribute to their resilience in finding a new life that is safer, more just, and with more opportunities to grow. The current U.S. administration is openly criminalizing immigrants who have crossed the border and are undocumented, many of whom have followed exhaustive processes to apply for asylum. We have to stop dehumanizing each other. Nobody is illegal on stolen land.
Can you provide details about the nature of the images you have been doing and those you have been working on? If I am not wrong, you have been investigating family albums and you are also making portraits yourself. What is the exact creative process behind those two kinds of pictures you work on and how have you integrated them into the final version of the book?
As you mentioned, the photographs I’ve used for this project include archival images from my family albums, as well as photographs taken in collaboration with my relatives and community members. The latter were coordinated in advance, meaning we would set up a date to gather and photograph with various levels of direction. Some photographs were more spontaneous and others required a bit more planning and direction. My study of the family archives takes place when I visit Peru only, as that is the only time I can sit with the physical photographs and digitize them in batches. During this process, I mainly look for moments that feel tender and joyful.
The notion of identity is also very much related with the idea of having some sense of belonging. And this is also conditioned by the places where you live, the family, the culture, and the community you live in. Can you tell us more how this project has been approaching the idea of belonging for the Latinx community you work with and if something has changed in that sense since you are working on this book and this photographic project. Does this Latinx community feel more attached to their memories, to their own Latinx identity, or is there a higher sense of belonging that has been provoked by your work?
Something many Latinx immigrants share is that many of us could not carry much in our journey—including our photographic archives—often due to the urgency or precarity of our departure. The absence of photographs as objects that activate our sense of identity and belonging becomes an elephant in the room. The reason is clear: Survival takes precedence.
In New York, this means navigating expensive housing, harsh working conditions, a new language for many, and a living pace that startles you from the moment you arrive. Time becomes too scarce to focus on who you are and where you (want to) belong, yet we still crave this sentiment and do our best to find answers. We keep celebrating together, spending time with each other, sharing our dreams and hopes. For me, these moments felt most meaningful to document with my camera—to use photography as a form of soft resistance, pushing back not through dominance, but through care.
Diana Guerra’s Fleeting Under Light. Seaton Street Press. Copyright © Diana Guerra, 2024.
Did you show Fleeting Under Light to the Latinx community you worked with? What has been their reaction in general?
I’ve found different instances where to share the book with my relatives and friends who participated in its creation. Most of their reactions have resembled looking through a family album, and remembering the people and moments we captured together. Even though the image quality is softer and some details are lost due to the photographic techniques and the risography, their reactions have been consistent: There is tenderness and joy in remembering those who may no longer be with us but that we keep vividly present in our hearts.
Are you planning to continue in this line of inquiry? What are the new projects you have been developing around migration and Latinx Identity.
I’m currently collaborating with a group of Latinx women activists focusing on memory and their advocacy work in the city. This project has been a bit more complex as it integrates other mediums besides photography such as filmmaking and social practice. We’ve been using the participants' archives as a starting point to reflect on their identities as Latinas fighting for better living and working conditions in New York. The work has involved documenting their activism and collaboratively recreating archival photographs—images originally taken either in their places of origin or soon after their arrival in the city.
Diana Guerra’s Fleeting Under Light. Seaton Street Press. Copyright © Diana Guerra, 2024.