When I came back to Argentina after living in Spain for many years, I had just turned forty, and felt the need to work on my identity. Photography, with its precise ability to freeze a point in time, was the tool I used for this purpose.

I began going through my family photographs, the ones from my youth, the ones from school. I found our class portrait from first year [eighth grade], taken in 1967, and felt the need to know what had become of each one of my classmates.

I decided to hold a 25th reunion of my classmates from the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires so that we could see each other again. I invited those I was able to find to my house, and proposed doing a portrait of each of them.

I made a huge enlargement of the '67 picture, the flrst one in which we were all together, to serve as a backdrop for the portraits, and asked each classmate to include an element of his or her current life in their portrait.

I continued to do portraits of those classmates who did not come to the reunion, but the large photograph could not be moved. I took small copies of it along to include in the portraits I did of those I was able to find. The portraits were done in Buenos Aires, Madrid, Robledo de Chavela (Spain), and New York.

Later, a ceremony was organized, in memory of the students of the school who had disappeared or were murdered by state terrorism in the black years of the dictatorship. After twenty years, the school authorities accepted, for the flrst time, that the missing be officially recognized in the school's main hall. It was a historic occasion.

I decided to work on the surface of the large photograph that had served as a backdrop for the portraits of my classmates, and to write a few thoughts about each of their lives on the image.