Archipelago
Archipelago explores the fragile balance between connection and solitude. Through staged scenes featuring friends and family, Yolanda del Amo examines how class, family, and gender shape our identities and relationships. Each photograph becomes an “island”: a quiet, charged space where intimacy and distance coexist, revealing the tensions of living together and apart.
Photography Yolanda del Amo
Claudia, Peter and Luna, 2006
Archipelago is a long-term photographic project by Yolanda del Amo that navigates into the complex terrain of human relationships, the continual push and pull between connection and independence, belonging and isolation. Created over a decade between 2004 and 2014, the work draws on the artist’s observations of friends and family, using real homes and familiar environments as stages on which unspoken emotional narratives unfold. Each image is grounded in real lives yet elevated through a theatrical approach: the poses, gestures, and compositions are carefully orchestrated, turning everyday spaces into psychological landscapes.
Del Amo’s photographs examine how individuals navigate the roles society assigns to them: as partners, parents, children, or companions and how those roles both connect and divide us. Class, gender, and family expectations become subtle but powerful forces shaping each character’s presence within the frame. The silence between people becomes the central language: a sideways glance, a physical distance, the placement of objects, or the tension in a room speaks to longing, withdrawal, habit, love, or fatigue.
Influenced by the emotional precision of Pina Bausch’s dance theater, Del Amo combines choreographed direction with authentic human vulnerability. Her sitters are not actors, yet they embody imagined relationships that reflect deeper truths about intimacy. The resulting tableaux blur fiction and reality, exposing the fragile balance between the social performance we maintain and the interior desires we often keep hidden.
Across the series, domestic and public spaces operate like islands, separate emotional territories, each with its own sense of belonging and estrangement. A couple close enough to feel each other’s warmth remains worlds apart; a family shares a room but not a feeling; technology connects and isolates simultaneously. The images ask us to question how we share space without necessarily sharing ourselves.
Archipelago ultimately becomes a study of how people relate — or fail to relate — while living side by side. Through quiet tension and visual clarity, Del Amo reveals what is unsaid yet deeply felt. Her work reminds us that even within the same world, we inhabit distinct interiors, always searching for the bridges that bring our islands closer together.
Edith and Juan, 2007
Diana and Josefina, 2007
“Archipelago is an exploration of interpersonal connections and disconnections, and the dichotomy between the longing for closeness and the need for individuality. The relationship between the people in the images defines itself through the setting, which becomes a psychological extension of their character. Using silence as a platform, these photographs operate as a collection of ‘islands,’ separated by the loneliness of each one and linked by the intimate bond of belonging to the same world.”
Yolanda del Amo
Jesse and Kerry, 2005
Elena, Malena and Dean, 2005
Noemí and Joseant, 2010
You can buy Archipelago directly from the publisher Kehrer Verlag
About Yolanda
She is a Spanish-born, New York-based photographic artist with an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and supported by numerous institutions including the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Spanish Ministry of Culture, among others.
To see more of his work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram
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