An International Archive
When I photograph a landscape the idea of a silent drama, with a scenery and a plot inspires me. Apparently it’s an orderly and soothing world in which elapses an ephemeral outcome of colour and light, but in fact this world breaks down, founders after a fire or any other kind of catastrophe.
I dislike giving details of the location of my photographs. Many of them, as if I could enter the scene at any moment, are my home and shelter of my dreams.
JM Ramírez-Suassi, Majorca, Spain
In times when nothing seems to have been created to last and it is the ephemeral reason of things that prevails, our transfiguration toward a disposable world is recognized as a congenital illness.
We live mesmerized by an entertainment society that in a systematic, insensitive manner creates, exhausts, and discards. Under the inflexible, dominant pressure of a culture of immediacy, it subjects its own product to terminal corrosion.
Beyond the rigidity of the conceptual apparatus and ideological assumptions, the civilization of entertainment is cruel. It has no memory. It lives stuck to novelty, no matter which, as long as it moves on.
This vertiginous production rate leads nowhere but to an accelerated obsolescence of its mechanisms. Thus, film settings — apparently enormous and grandiose — suffer the depraved parody of their own fleetingness. Settings condemned by their own staging.
A mere instrument for fantasy, when a setting becomes repetitive in the collective imagination, the same industry that created it sentences it to destruction. If not physically, by discrediting it with neglect.
It is these containing spaces with no content that frame this series. Photographs that capture these spaces now condemned to become even more contrived theme parks, by-products of a tourism industry that long ago became disfigured into another entertainment society’s tentacle.
Thus, hordes of visitors searching to devirtualize something that was previously constructed in their pictorial imaginary will dictate the epilogue for spaces recorded herein.
— José Luis De La Parra, Madrid, Spain
The city of Perugia is experiencing a time of great change and dislocation of the road or redefinition of its nerve centers. The construction of the Minimetrò started and ended with the ambition to carry most of the traffic directed to the parking lot to the acropolis of Pian di Massiano. It has changed significantly an innovative urban landscape of an important part of the city, starting with the redefinition the map of the areas most important to the city life. The new hospital Santa Maria della Misericordia has replaced the old hospital Monteluce — already demolished to make way for a residential and commercial area. Other important urban spaces await conversion projects. Settlements of large retailers are springing up on the edge of the suburbs, expanding more and more towards the neighboring municipalities.
All this ferment invites one to document this change, opposition, juxtaposition and layering of the urban and suburban landscape. The way in which the old town, suburbs, and rural areas are merging, intersecting or engulfing. A great ambition perhaps, but suited to the medium of photography.
Wandering in these places, visually noting landscapes, details that make up the overlapping of architectural details is not necessarily valuable or special. Architectural ambitions, often succeeded in a few decades, can help to describe the life of the city and also to imagine what will be. I do not aspire to a rigorous study of architecture, urban planning or sociology, but simply to convey the feelings, sometimes unusual, which can give the city, seeing and living with a free look from the rush of a hasty step.
Giuseppe Rossi, Perugia, Italy
Traditionally the term “desert” has referenced a place that is deserted, without people, and unpopulated. However, now, more than ever, the idea of an empty landscape is far less accurate. Raised in the Phoenix area, I have developed a personal obsession with and appreciation for these transformative spaces. I firmly believe that while we shape this land, nature continues to co-sculpt alongside us and my works act as reflections on the inherent contemporary symbolism and continually challenged identities found within the Southwest. Intermittently exploring how artifacts provide context to environment, I’m concerned with narratives related to the symmetry in nature and the human experience. While questioning concepts of permanence, I’m consistently attracted to the conscious and unconscious realities of what this desert stage provides.
— William LeGoullon, Phoenix, Arizona, USA
In Superior Apartments I sought to capture and present the complex layers of development that have taken place in the Bronx — a virtual laboratory of urban development. In its history, the Bronx has had dramatic cycles of promise, possibility, loss and revival. For much of its history since becoming part of New York City in the late 1800’s, the Bronx, with its solid brick apartment buildings and homes, was a step up the ladder for recent immigrants. In the 1920’s, apartment construction flourished along the Grand Concourse (the borough’s “Champs Elysee”), producing the nation’s largest collection of art-deco buildings. But by the 1970’s, the Bronx became synonymous with urban decline. Despite changes that have taken place since that time, the reputation of the Bronx has largely remained frozen. In Superior Apartments I try to look at the Bronx objectively as it exists now. While some of the photographs in this project include places that have become run-down, Superior Apartments is not a photographic study of urban ruin and decline. Instead, it is a presentation of the range, chaos, irony, richness and beauty of the urban landscape.
— Ira Wagner, Montclair, New Jersey, USA
The city of Rome is truly one of the most beautiful places in the world with its magnificent churches, ancient ruins, and picturesque views. These defining characteristics entice millions of visitors to Rome each year resulting in a city overflowing with tourists. Among the congestion and noise of the city, flows the Tiber River, which is segregated from its urban environment due its low elevation and towering embankments. As a result, the river and its environs are underutilized, poorly maintained, and starkly different from the bustling streets of Rome.
The area between the river’s embankments is an intermediate zone where nature and culture converge. The unique ecosystem of the Tiber is complex and quite fascinating. Although the river is inundated with trash and contaminated from the city’s runoff, nevertheless it continues to provide habitat to a variety of animals as well as offers refuge for many of the city’s inhabitants, especially the homeless. The Tiber River represents the resiliency of nature and provides a framework for tourists and locals alike to contemplate the relationship humans have with the natural world.
— Alexander Diaz, St. Augustine, Florida
To me photographing is telling a story through the subjects of reality, creating impressions and fascination that generates questions from the people who look at my pictures. If a simple picture can generate questions in a person who then tries to know more about what he is looking at, this is simply great. This is the purpose of this project Atmospheres: trying to represent the empty urban scenes in a nocturnal mood. A mood made of contrast, rarefied lives, bright lights and gloomy shadows, quietness and tension. Everything takes on a mystical charm which is so colorful but also dark, and all seems magical and suspended as if time were frozen. This series of urban landscapes tries to explain, (through the beauty of the night’s atmospheres) the wonderful charm of the unknown.
— Luca Orsi, Varese, Italy
Clearfield is a portrait of a Pennsylvania town in the process of losing its local businesses to competition from international superstores, such as Walmart. Clearfield is an excellent example of what is lost culturally when town centers are abandoned for megastores, because of its long history and uniquely American roots. Here you can find pristine examples of early American homes and WPA buildings, 50’s era movie theaters, and remnants of hundred-year-old unions and associations. Furthermore, these institutions’ history continues to play a vital role in the lives of the citizens of this rural manufacturing town to this day. Unfortunately, if the town center economically fails, the architecture where so much of its values reside will likely go with it, to be replaced by the curiously a-historical environments of mega-marts.
— Max Ross, Evanston, Illinois
I was born in Tucumán, Argentina, a city known as “the garden of the Republic,” because of its vast natural beauty. That land left a mark on me with its greenness, its silence and its light. I grew up among the mountains, surrounded by yungas, between the leafiness of the jungle and the dryness of the valleys.
It was almost without noticing it that the geography of those scenarios started to leave its fingerprints in my subjectivity, shaping my sight.
Today, in the distance, the memories of my hometown emerge as flashes that guide my steps.
These photographs, part of a project titled The Garden, were taken in Buenos Aires’s Botanical Garden, as an attempt to find that light and greenness again. By doing so, I realized that in the end it is always about the same inner landscape that I take with me wherever I go.
— Karina Azaretzky, Buenos Aires, Argentina
I take photos of places that sing to me.
This may sound odd, but never the less it is the best way to describe my experience. I may be driving my car in the middle of the night, when suddenly a place, an object, or a house, calls my attention and I cannot go any further before I have examined it thoroughly. Then I will walk the area with my camera and learn everything I can about that specific place. Learn how the different elements relate to each other; see how the place has been modified by man.
Often I need to come back and learn more about it, to find exactly what it was that called my attention. To find out what the song is all about.
When I am sensing the surroundings I try to perceive it in an abstract way. I am not interested in the object per se, but how the space, forms and different materials are in a relationship; how the communication between objects and surrounding occur. This knowing is the song.
I am not sure what I want to achieve with my photos. Maybe to question the way we see our surroundings without really seeing it and thereby make us more aware of the process of seeing.
I studied art at Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts (Department of Painting) in Reykjavik and further at School of Visual Arts (Department of Painting) in New York. Later I took an education in psychology, first at the University of Iceland and later at Aarhus University. I work as a clinical psychologist. I live in the southern parts of Denmark but consider myself to be Icelandic.
— Ragnar Stefánsson, Sønderborg, Denmark
