PORTRAITS OF LUCIA
What girl has not played with make-up? Stuffed a balloon under her dress to play at being pregnant? Played mother? Or dressed up in her mother’s or sister’s clothing to parade around pertly? The photographs from the series ‘Portraits of Lucía’ (2001) are disturbing. They show the seven-year-old daughter of Roxana Nagygellér (Costa Rica, b. 1963) portraying various female stereotypes. Lucía here personifies something that concerns Nagygellér, namely that the role patterns and limitations of the woman in Latin American society are already introduced in the childhood and education of young girls – and that this is an unconscious process in which we are all accomplices.