At first glance, you may be tricked into thinking that what you have in your hands is an old schoolbook, colours worn away by the passage of time. A small handwritten inscription, a name and a number, seems to be the only trace of ownership. However, once you turn the page, the schoolbook transforms into a gateway of deep reds and piercing shadows. All of a sudden, it’s night and you are looking at a man walking away from you, fading into black, only to then meet the fuzzy gaze of a girl, fading in white. Amidst this series of photographs, the title of this mysterious schoolbook appears: Rules for Fighting. You’ve only turned three pages, but you already feel like you’re part of a movie that, gently yet powerfully, unfolds before your eyes.

I return to this photobook by Paola Jiménez Quispe and realize with fondness that it keeps striking a chord. When I first stumbled upon it three years ago, I was simultaneously looking at the works of Olenka Carrasco and Luis Carlos Tovar, artists who, like Jiménez, were moved by an unfathomable urge: to make sense of loss. These three artists turned their gazes’ inwards, digging into their family archives searching for traces of their lost parents and homelands, connecting their pursuits with the wider social realities of Peru, Venezuela and Colombia. Their books show photography as a space where history unfolds through changes in colour, shape and format, always in dialogue with literature and poetry.

Within this chorus, Jiménez’s uniqueness lies in building tension out of, seemingly, innocuous fragments of everyday life: snapshots of doors, stairs, trees or old film stills of family trips. She does so by skillfully playing with the visual effects and material qualities that give her work a cinematic feel, such as colour shifts, light leaks and degradations, motion blurs or zooms on surface fibers. Placed in between the empty graph paper lines of the notebook - as well as the handwritten notes of her father and mother - the photographs become charged with emotion. In her work, sight doesn’t aim to ‘capture’ emotion but to evoke it.

PAOLA JIMÉNEZ QUISPE is a photographer and archivist based in Lima, Peru. Her work revolves around memory and trauma, with a belief that individual stories reveal universal struggles. Jiménez works across various media, including photography, text, documents, video, and painting. Her photobook Rules for Fighting was published by Witty Books and Images Vevey in 2022. She was the winner of the Images Vevey Special Jury Prize in 2021, a finalist for the Aperture Photobook Award in 2022, and a recipient of the Bird in Flight Prize, 2020 and POY LATAM, 2025.

VALERIA POSADA VILLADA is a historian and curator specialising in photography, performance and arts from Latin America & The Caribbean. She is currently responsible for managing the photography collection of the World Museum, in the Netherlands. Prior to her current position, Valeria worked as curator of Public Practice at Foam and curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Museum of Colombia, supporting the work of emerging and established talents alike through exhibitions and public programs.