Elle Pérez

La despedida means “the farewell” and the images of Pérez’s grandfather’s home document a visit made by the artist to say a final goodbye to an ailing patriarch. 

Bronx-based photographer Elle Pérez (b. 1989) constructs lush and tactile photographs born from careful attention to the objects, settings, and individuals in their everyday life. Pérez constructs lush and tactile photographs born from careful attention to the objects, settings, and individuals of their everyday life. The artist’s 2025 series “La Despedida (the world is always ending, the world is always again beginning)” encompasses photographs taken in the gardens of two very different sites: Pérez’s grandfather’s backyard in Puerto Real, Puerto Rico, and Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s home in Giverny, France. In the eleven photographs on view, Pérez deploys close cropping, zooming in on expanses of blooming flowers, lace curtains, and breaking waves.

La despedida means “the farewell,” and the images of Pérez’s grandfather’s home document a visit made by the artist to say a final goodbye to an ailing patriarch. Giverny, too, was the site of Monet’s passing. Yet, as the subtitle indicates, parting is not quite permanent. Goodbyes and endings—browning blooms, sunsets, and ebbing tides—accompany beginnings such as new buds, sunrises, and returning waves. The “ephemeral condition of living,” as Pérez has described it, is enmeshed with the ephemeral condition of dying.

In these images, one layer of visual information is partially masked by another. By blocking full access to the image, the artist prompts a pattern of looking marked by searching, pondering, and imagining. In obscuring just enough detail, Pérez invites observers to use their own experiences, senses, and memories to fill in the blanks, facilitating an embodied connection with the image. In meditating on their departed grandfather’s plantain groves or Monet’s pond of water lilies, Pérez engages with people who are gone through places that were important to them. Because the images are not definitive, explanatory, or didactic, the observer is invited to do the same. Understanding is only ever a partial view.

Elle Pérez (born 1989)
untitled (light window), 2025
archival pigment print
Edition of 5 plus II AP
Image courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal, New York
Photo: Joerg Lohse