Suburban Spaces
(NYC, 2001)
This body of work consists on 18 nocturnes, shot with a medium format camera in Queens, New York, between January and May of 2001. Several walks in the middle of the night -with the tripod over my right shoulder and my camera case on my left hand- in the Astoria area and surroundings, gave as a result this series of images.
The photographs allude to the impact of the human being in a urban landscape which is isolated and abandoned, which are metaphorically implied in the vacuum of the spaces, in the absence of the human being, who has left traces of his presence, but he or she are not present physically. He has left behind him certain structures that rust and get dirtier and dirtier over time. The images paralyze this process of change –a dead change- and they petrify it, generating an eternal present were decay has stopped
obligatorily due to the nature of still photography itself. There is a need by the artist to create a pause, analyze his or her own emotions and crop apiece of reality that represents what he or she thinks.
The decay of the surfaces and architectonic structures –like in a Stieglitzian equivalence- metaphorically expresses emotions like the corrosion of the soul and other feelings like loneliness, uncertainty, fear, hope, nostalgia and other sensations that are so abstract that cannot be named because they do not work at the level of language, but to a more animal but profound level, more natural, more real. Such texture of decay in the surfaces also symbolizes the decadence of the world in which we live in. The corrupted society, the destruction of nature by man, the destruction of men by men, are the structures that he builds in order to collaborate in the creation of a thanatic and oppressive system, completely apart from the natural world.
