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CITY AND IMAGERY
Since 1999, at least, I've been taking photographs in the cities I visited with the certainty of making a completely different work -almost alien- regarding those projects in which I was involved in those times. This group of pictures, not as dispersed as fragmentary, has taken shape and coherence when overlapped to other personal interests related with the imagery, the urban and the proper memory.
Additionally it's opened a new path which route has decided some personal options. Therefore, without talking about an absolute overcoming over the Photographic Project, a previous planning of the creative work has been traced, complying with the concept of “Archive as a deposit for the personal Imagery” and containing biographic experiences. Town planning, as we know it, it's completely obsolete, and there's a common understanding about this even when it hasn't changed in a noticeable way for the citizen. Its representation and creation techniques are stuck in concepts of volume, alignment and low-elevation which, together with some satandarized targets, don't answer to anybody's necessities. On the contrary, it's still kept in full production when it's obvious for everybody that their products are not valid anymore. In this context, the imagery has moved on towards emblematic groups which entitle the citizen with many skills to the simultaneos exercise of answer/proposal -defense and attack- required to live in this frontier position. The so-called historical imagery gave us enough keys to the self-assurance while the urban environment could be perceived as an isolated organization, able to impose its own structural logic to every surrounding reality (physical, social, cultural, financial...) and therefore its relation with power, as it's been studied many times before.
But the city is not only conceivable as an organization so complex that devours its own imagery in the search of new attitudes and living ways. On the other side, contemporary thinking promotes a drastic re-planning over the basis of cultural production when it has reconsidered the old Symbol/Object dialectic, formulated now in terms obeying other principles: a Symbol for the Consumer and an Object for the User, understanding Consume as passive, to expire, and given up to power, while the Use is active, instrumental and its expiring is only limited by physical exhausting. In this context, photographing the city is a priority for the urban photographer, paying attention always to it as an uncertain searching, submitted to the documentation of the collective researching more than the author's certainties. Therefore, it is little what you can expect from the traditional ways associated to Photography, if there's anything left of it after being captured by other disciplines in need of its media value. There is no need for a higher stylistic treatment in order to tell the same story -looking for supoort in the sophistication of the new tools and the subtlety in languages- to citizens more and more selective in which there is no will to lose in a starring character. If a future citiy has to be imagined, everything points a finger to an investigation over the urban emblems -and its contemporary ghosts- with the most possible open mind. If there's a need on developing a new collective urban imagery, the photographer's role will be complementary and reduced to the humble figure of an anonymous archivist, accumulating, saving and putting in order a content representing nothing but the fragmentary result of a constructive effort of an Urban Imagery with the materials from its own Memory.
