Reality Through Storefront Windows Steven P. Nichols Jr. - The News
go to original March 15, 2012

MEXICO CITY - Walking around Mexico City’s Historical Center, one can find pretty much every consumer item available in the country – almost every street is lined with dozens of stores selling essentially the same thing. Peer through the storefront windows and you can see musical instruments, abundant rolls of different types of fabrics, aisles and aisles of aging books and not so state-of-the-art laptops and cell phones. But that’s you – Juan San Juan, a photographer, web content producer and video editor, sees something completely different.

What San Juan sees in the storefront windows of the Historical Center’s packed and chaotic environment is the subject of his latest photography exhibit, “Urbes Imaginarias” (“Imaginary Metropolis”), located at the Museo Archivo de la Fotografía.

The exhibit, which was inaugurated on Feb. 23 and will remain at the museum through May 13, consists of 30 of San Juan’s unedited photographs taken over a span of five years in which he attempts to show the kaleidoscope of imagery that he sees in the storefronts of the nation’s capital.

San Juan’s photos, which look into storefront windows but reflect something entirely different – the people, animals and objects which happen to be passing by at that precise moment in time, almost seem to take the form of photomontages, one image carefully placed upon another, but don’t be fooled – San Juan’s images have never been subject to the careful eye and hand of a Photoshop wiz.

“These are pure photographs,” María Lorenzten, the curator of the exhibition, said. “There is no modification at all – these are nothing but reflections. San Juan does use HDR (a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of an image), but he never introduces anything into his images that weren’t already there.”

So, if the phenomena that San Juan observes is real, present in this dimension of space and time, than why is the exhibition called “Imaginary Metropolis?”

“His reference point is firmly situated in reality,” Lorenzten said. “But, these images are ‘imaginary’ in the sense of what the person who views the image is seeing and the different conclusions he or she can make about what is there, or not there. The reflections in the storefront windows cause these images to be very imaginative and dreamy.”

San Juan’s exhibition has received positive criticism from many in the realm of photography, including the Spanish photographer Miguel Zavala, who compared his work to internationally-recognized photographers including Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Nacho López and Henri Cartier Bresson. But Lorenzten added that San Juan’s photography takes the art a step further.

“I think he gets these comparisons because they all used the streets of their cities as a their subject, especially Nacho López,” Lorenzten said. “Juan differs from them because he creates an imaginary interpretation of the city – it’s not a photo-documentary of the city, as was the case with the other photographers. He creates a fantasy which results in a kaleidoscope of images that jumps out at the viewer. If you really look at one of the images, you’ll always find something new – they are very saturated images which tell us about the movement of the city. They even seem to have a sound…you can hear what is happening at the moment that the photo was taken.”

The selection of the photos, which are not titled, simply numbered, proved to be a daunting task for Lorenzten who had to choose from over 3,000 images San Juan took during his 5-year journey through the streets of Mexico City.

“Juan is a very tenacious photographer,” Lorenzten said. “I tried to find the images which were most representative of the themes that one finds in the Historic Center – there is idolization, sexuality, ethnic groups, the subway, Popular Art and creativity.”

Along with “Urbes Imaginarias,” the exhibit also contains a sub-section of photographs, not taken in storefront windows, titled “El tianguis erótico” (“The Erotic Market”), an exhibition of 25 photographs which looks at the different elements of eroticism that can be found in Mexico City’s abundant open-air markets.

This section, according to Zavala, who wrote a review on the exhibition, explores a wide range of themes including fetishism, the idealization of the human body, unattainable love, homosexuality and liberalism.

“It was also very difficult to select the images for this section because there were so many fantastic photographs that represented a host of different themes,” Lorenzten said. “The idea of this section was to take a look at exactly what is ‘popular art’ in Mexico’s markets. There is a certain aspect of eroticism that exists in these markets and the people who work and shop there coexist with this eroticism.”

The section also explores even more politically-sensitive topic such as the “misleading” representations of the female body in Mexico.

“If you look closely, you realize that the manikins used in the markets are not based on the normal physical characteristics of a Mexican woman,” Lorenzten said. “These are manikins based on the physical characteristics of ‘white’ people – this is the idealization of beauty and San Juan identifies this in his photographs.”

Check out “Urbes Imaginarias” at the Museo Archivo de la Fotografía from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.

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