Ana María García Rojas is a Colombian photographer based in France. She began her career in photojournalism in Colombia, where she built a strong foundation in observation, narrative, and lived experience while working for national media and later as a videographer for the Office of the President of Colombia. That documentary background continues to shape her sensitivity to storytelling and the emotional resonance of everyday life.
After several years living in Australia and later relocating to Europe, questions of migration, displacement, belonging, and reorientation became central to her way of seeing. Her current practice works across self-portraiture, archive, text, and constructed imagery, bringing documentary attentiveness into dialogue with contemporary photographic language. Through long-term projects, she investigates how intimate experience can open toward broader forms of recognition.
Her work has been recognized in Colombia and internationally, including the Colprensa Journalism Prize, the Colombian Journalism Prize Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, an Honourable Mention at Pictures of the Year International (POYi), and a Commended distinction in the 2023 Mono Awards. She is currently pursuing a Master’s program in New Documentary Photography at LABASAD, while developing long-term projects in contemporary photography.
Project Statement
Where Things Begin is a photographic series set in one of the most ordinary and overlooked spaces of daily life: the bathroom. Usually understood as a purely functional room, here it becomes a site of metamorphosis – a private threshold where identity is loosened, examined, and remade.
Behind a locked door, the body is briefly released from performance. Clothes come off, but so do social roles, expectations, and the masks required by public life. In this enclosed space, attention turns inward. Rituals of washing, grooming, waiting, hiding, and confronting one’s reflection become small acts through which the self is continuously reconstructed.
I think of the bathroom as a laboratory of the self: a place where intimacy and estrangement coexist, where the body appears both vulnerable and theatrical, and where transformation is not symbolic but physical, emotional, and psychological. The images move between clarity and opacity, control and disintegration, recognition and distortion, suggesting that identity is never fixed, but constantly produced through repetition, care, and tension.
In a time when images are made to be consumed instantly, and selves are shaped for visibility, Where Things Begin turns toward a hidden room and a slower kind of seeing. It proposes privacy not as withdrawal, but as a radical space of becoming.
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