Down the Garden Path - YOHAN NIETO

Footsteps echo in the dead of night, coming from the courtyard.

Awake, he sits up in bed and strains his ears. The dull thumping of his own heart prevents him from properly hearing the danger that seems to be closing in. He suddenly thinks of his neighbor, whom he saw yesterday and who had warned him, as rumors were once again circulating about him. He also thinks of his wife and his one-year-old daughter, sleeping alone upstairs. Of his rifle, lying a few centimeters from him, already loaded, ready to fire. He snaps out of his thoughts and starts listening again. The sounds have stopped. False alarm. A drop of sweat trickles down the back of his neck. Slowly, he lies back down on his makeshift bed. It won't be tonight.

This is how "Down the Garden Path" begins. Through the account of Ramon, a young family man with republican ideals on the eve of Franco's dictatorship, sleeping in his cellar to escape the deadly repression. A rifle at the foot of his bed, and a hole the size of a fist, dug just beside the door, so he could defend himself the day the "Falangistas" came for him.

It is from this first image, drawn from the testimony of his great-grandfather, that the artist weaves the fabric of a photographic inquiry across the Galician landscape. Combining an approach that blends documentary and fiction, as well as archives, texts, and performance, his work takes the form of an exploration of the historical memory of Francoism. "Down the Garden Path" seeks to inscribe itself in the lineage of a collective work born from the Spanish antifascist struggle, more necessary than ever in the context of the fascization of late capitalism.

Yohan Nieto (1994, he/him, ES) is a photographer whose work explores the context of late capitalism, in particular its process of fascization and the civil resistance that results from it.

His work revolves around theatricality, performativity, and collaboration within the documentary genre, and navigates between photography, text, and archives, addressing themes related to history and politics, the past and the present, facts and fiction. He also works as an independent architecture photographer in Switzerland.

Trained as an Interactive Media Designer at ERACOM, Lausanne (2012–2016), then holding a professional Maturity in Visual and Applied Arts from CEPV, Vevey (2017), he obtained his diploma in visual communication, photography specialization, from CEPV in 2025. His series "Down the Garden Path," produced between 2023 and 2026, was notably a finalist for the SIYU Award 2025 and won the Photoforum Prize 2025.