One can think of the urban environment in its various stages of building and tearing down as an interlocking mechanism similar to a pocket watch or Rubik’s cube. Each part of the city, its buildings, its billboards, and its many pieces interlock to provide traction for the cogs of the watch to continue its movements. […]
“In avoiding the self-imposed restrictions of the Bechers and their countless imitators, López Luz spares us from the tediousness of some of those series, dissecting singular aspects of the urban environment with great insight.”
“Demand found in Lautner’s dusty models a way of problem solving and working through designs even though these were for Lautner’s building proposals that never saw realisation.”
“The modern city engenders various pathologies, among them agoraphobia and claustrophobia – the one an intense anxiety felt in open spaces, the other, a panic brought about by confinement. Horizont channels both of these aberrations.”
“The discipline of history is to weigh heavily on our beings. Without the harness of its chagrin, we float hereditarily as non-entity, just as we float into those futures in the same capacity of nothingness, but presumed possibility”.
“What do the citadels of disaster capitalism tell us about our New World Reich-The Trump Tower, but also the Lehman Brothers buildings, the ING Insurance Corp building, the Rockefeller Center etc? It tells that Epcot Center looks great on bath salts under all those gleaming lights and mirrored windows-prohibitive to the many, inviting to the few”.
“I went with Laura looking for gay go-go bars and assisting her to shoot in brothels and demolished hotels, I shot with Daisuke in backstreets at night (he was photographing with some weird infrared hunting device) while Hiroshi was using a document hand-scanner to capture surfaces and the intricacy of bed-sheets, lingerie and curtains, later on we found out he also scanned bodies. I spent the nights with Olivier wandering the dark corners of Chinatown.”
“Everything about the city made me uncomfortable and raised questions: the landscape, the atmosphere, the situation, the agitation, etc. It seemed so imperfect. I wanted to understand this chaos.” To the West, is the Atlantic Ocean and the Americas. Facing East, the huge Sahara Desert. The city of Dakar in Senegal sits in between these […]
“the watchmaker must duly take an ever-present duty to keep the machinations from stalling and presenting the case for non-linearity”
Each image still serves as a living testament of sorts, but as winter approaches, I fear they will begin to form colonies of graves, for which, I have no answers.
Ponte City came to stand for urban decay and criminality, and in some of the more right-wing imaginings, as a symbol of the failure of black majority rule.
There are almost no humans in Wender’s photos. I almost forget there’s a human behind the camera in a way that would never happen with other road trip photographers.