Before the Threshold by Clemente Bernad photographer

From the time the pandemic took hold in Madrid and forced its citizens into lockdown, photographer Clemente Bernad has carried out the same daily ritual: crossing his doorway, roaming the city, taking pictures of everything he comes across and returning home with images from the outside.

Under normal circumstances this practice would be of no particular relevance. Right now it has become a kind of otherworldly journey.

The streets Bernad travels through today are not the streets of yesterday; they may appear familiar but there is an atmosphere that has turned a familiar environment into something strange. We see this strangeness in ordinarily full spaces that are now completely empty, as if a long night had settled over the beating heart of the city and refused to budge.

Therefore, the photographer walks around familiar landscapes as if wandering around a suburb or through dark alleys, a terrain where limits and distances blur into a threat. Walking past somebody in this frame of mind can generate suspicion and fear, where body movements verge on retreat or escape.

The city becomes a threshold.

In this situation you either flee or roam; you never stroll. There are those that wander where nobody remains, those covering themselves with cardboard boxes, the doors to their landings always open. Solitary bodies which in an empty city bring to mind the detritus of a wreckage. Alongside these bodies are the others, those floating on the concrete, aimlessly, those gloves that first helped us save ourselves and are now disowned and mutilated on pavements, evoking every body without mourning, those discarded by this pandemic.

The photographer examines them closely, finding in them the precise way to represent pain that can be seen and shared… far from figures and numbers. Among visible, masked, wandering and deserted beings Clemente Bernad roams like a spectre, prowling around this kind of atmosphere or Stygian lagoon the street has become.

A photographer asks questions of the world by questioning appearances in every frame of their work, in each photo they take. Akin to the poet, they follow a way of travelling across the border of the obvious to find places from which to make out images which, paradoxically, enable us to see that which happens and surrounds us, but which we do not see (even less so in our domestic confinement).

This is precisely Bernad’s undertaking in the work he shows us here: leaning into the threshold. Yet returning from the netherworld with the camera full of scenes that help us to get our bearings is a disquieting task from which it is not easy to leave unscathed. When he returns, crossing through the last streets close to home, no one looks back at him, and it is then that he is tempted to look in the mirror to confirm his existence. He is not another spectre, but could easily become one.

He takes glimpses and presses the shutter of his camera on his own body, reflected in shop windows. The void returns a deformed version of himself, a phantasmagorical self, alone, with no community. This seems to define the subject that currently moves through a desolate city.