While popular culture beguiles us with the myth of
an untamed nature in which to get away from the
frustrations of our daily lives, our most habitual experience
keeps us tied either to mass tourism or to
fleeting escapes to places that are simply what is left
of the landscape: vestiges of what was once countryside,
now overrun by industry, housing developments
and superstores. Appropriated out of necessity
and transformed through sheer resilience, these
places have been rescued from their inhospitable
dimension to become plausible options in which we
can still enjoy a bit of free time in the sunshine, well
away from the bustle of the city.
It is precisely these
sites of leisure in post-industrial society that interest
Txema Salvans, whose shots of them bring out all
their surreal banality and sharpen the funny sense of
strangeness they engender. He does this by means of
two rhetorical devices. First, by maintaining a viewpoint
distanced enough to prioritize the scene and its
surrounding environment over the individual subjects
and their expressions, and secondly, and most
importantly, through the mechanism of ellipsis.
Most
of the pictures were taken on the beach or near the
sea, and the sea is therefore what justifies the presence
of people sunbathing, fishing or playing on the
sand. And yet the sea is always invisible, because
Salvans positions himself between the water and the
characters, reversing the direction of his gaze. As a result,
what the camera shows us is the degraded background
that the characters want to turn their backs
on. To turn one's back on something is to ignore it,
even to pretend that it does not exist.
Based on real facts
Joan Fontcuberta reads the work of photographer Txema Salvans, who surveys the leisure sites of the post-industrial society, bringing out all their surreal banality and sharpening the funny sense of strangeness they engender.
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- Txema Salvans
- 12 February 2013
- Barcelona
Salvans's work
speaks to us, then, of this collective self-deception
that leads us to fantasize these transient scraps of
paradise. Since we have no way of knowing if any
other paradise is possible, we content ourselves
with these moments of tranquillity and even happiness
amidst the concrete and the factories. But it also
speaks to us of a paradox in the politics of seeing.
The paradox is that we viewers-of-the-photographs
are denied the chance to see what the actors-in-the-photographs
want to see, while what is rubbed in our
eyes instead is what they do not want to see. It is
Salvans who manages the instances of that dialectic
and in doing so demonstrates, as Nietzsche held, that
there are no facts, only interpretations.
Joan Fontcuberta,
visual artist, photography lecturer
This text was originally published in the catalogue of the 3rd GD4PhotoArt young artist competition, on the theme of "Photography meets Industry", promoted by GD and Fondazione Isabella Seràgnoli.