Evolving the project into a more personal gaze, Ribeira eventually honed in on everyday life in the region. She was most interested in the children of local migrant workers, and spent much of her time “searching for places, walking around with my camera, speaking with people I met outside, and so on”. This approach translates into an arduous production process, she adds, “because many days you come back home with no photos or many bad photos”.
But that process is also partly why artist and educator Alejandro Acín nominated Ribeira for Ones to Watch. “Bandia embraces slow photography to immerse herself in the places she works,” he says. “She is a committed practitioner, politically and artistically.” Her project Ni un hogar sin lumbre… is important, he adds, because, “It challenges the sometimes reductive and sensationalist narrative in the mainstream media about the working communities in this area. Bandia’s intimate and domestic approach to labour is unique and unusual within the long tradition of photographers exploring this topic.”
It is a tradition of which Ribeira is well aware. Her latest work was made in California’s Central Valley, where she worked for several months on a Fulbright research and artistic production grant, revisiting the locations in which Dorothea Lange photographed migrant farm workers in the 1930s and creating a modern-day update. She was also inspired by Cristina García Rodero’s colour photographs in Spain and the US throughout the 1980s and 90s, and Alex Webb’s work in New Mexico in the 2000s, both of which she found in the archive at Magnum Photos, New York.
