Alejandro Sosa
Seville in Progress
22 Sep 2011 - 15 Jan 2012
ALEJANDRO SOSA
Seville in Progress
22 September 2011 - 15 January 2012
Exhibition Session: Margin and City
The group of photo works on the city of Seville on display in the exhibition were taken over a period of twenty years, starting in the early 1990s when Alejandro Sosa (Coria del Río, Seville, 1951) thought of using a specific methodology to photograph a series of places in the city.
The moment in which Sosa embarked on this still uncompleted task coincided with the era in which huge urban changes were taking place in Seville, changes designed to resolve the serious lack of housing and amenities the city had been suffering from for several decades. It was also the period of preparation for the Universal Exposition of 1992 in the grounds of La Cartuja-a project on the part of the Spanish state that was to mean huge improvements, above all in the provision of services and infrastructures, the rehabilitation of the river for the city, and the striking of a new balance between centre and periphery.
The exhibition partly reveals these changes through panoramic images of impeccable facture whose conceptual basis is that of fragmentation.
His first works about the city were the starting point of his personal project Breaking the Circle, which is still in progress. As an urban subject, Seville goes on being depicted in fragmentary photographs. The method is always the same (a succession of consecutive shots of a given location, until completing a 360-degree circle which unfurls on a single plane). All the spaces are photographed at the same time of day, when the sun is at its highest. Without establishing hierarchies of value in the city and avoiding human presence, over the years Alejandro Sosa has, with the help of his cameras and his large oblong formats, constructed very special urban landscapes not without documental information. There is something sublime in this recording of images that we take to be a faithful reflection of those the photographer has in his mind prior to their materialization.
Seville in Progress
22 September 2011 - 15 January 2012
Exhibition Session: Margin and City
The group of photo works on the city of Seville on display in the exhibition were taken over a period of twenty years, starting in the early 1990s when Alejandro Sosa (Coria del Río, Seville, 1951) thought of using a specific methodology to photograph a series of places in the city.
The moment in which Sosa embarked on this still uncompleted task coincided with the era in which huge urban changes were taking place in Seville, changes designed to resolve the serious lack of housing and amenities the city had been suffering from for several decades. It was also the period of preparation for the Universal Exposition of 1992 in the grounds of La Cartuja-a project on the part of the Spanish state that was to mean huge improvements, above all in the provision of services and infrastructures, the rehabilitation of the river for the city, and the striking of a new balance between centre and periphery.
The exhibition partly reveals these changes through panoramic images of impeccable facture whose conceptual basis is that of fragmentation.
His first works about the city were the starting point of his personal project Breaking the Circle, which is still in progress. As an urban subject, Seville goes on being depicted in fragmentary photographs. The method is always the same (a succession of consecutive shots of a given location, until completing a 360-degree circle which unfurls on a single plane). All the spaces are photographed at the same time of day, when the sun is at its highest. Without establishing hierarchies of value in the city and avoiding human presence, over the years Alejandro Sosa has, with the help of his cameras and his large oblong formats, constructed very special urban landscapes not without documental information. There is something sublime in this recording of images that we take to be a faithful reflection of those the photographer has in his mind prior to their materialization.