REVEAL AND DETONATE HYDRA } ANA CASAS BRODA, GABRIELA GONZĂ LEZ REYES, GERARDO MONTIEL KLINT
REVEAL Uncover something that has been concealed. Clarify or untangle a mystery. Is it possible to generate models of sociability, identity, and collective memory from a photographic imaginary? Where do we come from? Who are we now? In what direction can we go, given an environment that shows us certain images? The more a photographic image symbolizes, the greater the photographer’s possibility of being absent from it and resignifying the collective psyche with its immediate reality. Interpreting and contextualizing what is produced and seen, in order to understand who we are, means facing certain issues. The attempt to express social, political, and historical symptoms in a society eager for constant dialogue and exchange, not only of images but also of local, regional, national, and international experiences and knowledge, configures us as social beings.
DETONATE Set off an explosive charge. To impose a vision is to propose, evoke, communicate, testify, engage in controversy, denounce, provoke, regard with irony, systemize, quote, paraphrase, contextualize, give sense to, trivialize, confront, exhibit, amuse, move, schematize, displace, tear down, emulate, pay homage to, react, define, explore, experience, and countless other possibilities. To impose a vision is above all to generate a discourse. A clear, concise discourse, regardless of its scope or theme, is no easy matter. A discourse is a solid, complex platform with layers of readings, some of them more superficial and epidermal, others denser and more surgical.
PHOTOGRAPHY AS A PHENOMENON OF IDEOLOGICAL TRANSITION WITH REPERCUSSIONS ON THE COLLECTIVE IMAGINARY Reveal and Detonate is a survey of current photographic production in Mexico from multiple viewpoints, in which photographers of different ages and from different parts of the country converge and intersect to chart a complex, contradictory, and disquieting map. The book seeks to provoke questions, to open up photography to reflections and dialogue that will stimulate new ideas to enrich the discipline. To reveal new ways of seeing and producing images. To detonate a debate on the way we conceive of the contemporary photographic image. We believe that the visibility and circulation of photography in Mexico have failed to develop at the same speed as the practice of photographers. It seems to us essential to pause, to take some distance, and to open up a panorama onto photographic production in contemporary Mexico. Museum spaces are insufficient, not only for the regular exhibition of work by new and established photographers, but also for gaining experience in the construction of solid and coherent discourses. In this respect, the internet offers new channels of circulation and exhibition, significantly changing the way in which the discourse, publication, and formatting of photographic works are conceived. Likewise, the proliferation of photobooks as a new way of constructing discourses and facilities for self-publication have opened new circuits for photographic work. Ways of structuring and consuming images are being transformed and unconventional new narratives are creating different ways of conceiving reality.
Reveal and Detonate presents photographers who understand the power of contemporary photographic production in Mexico outside of the time-honored circuits of validation, such as photography fairs, biennials, regional photography salons, galleries, and museums. The book undertakes to detonate reflection in the here and now, transforming our awareness of photographic practices and attitudes by making the photographic act a habit: photography as life experience. It is the works themselves that guide us in beginning to dissect present circumstances. We attempt to grasp an underlying order in the midst of anomalies. We assume certainties and risks in the aim of opening and articulating reflection on photography as medium, on the photographers, and on the context of production. We have combined new, difficult-to-classify photographers with other established ones, who work in relatively safe territories. All in all, they constitute a complex organism, with singularities, deficiencies, and specific functions in complex, vital, and thoroughly interconnected tissues. How to approach and understand something we have never seen before? This book contextualizes the photographers who appear in it, creating a network of connecting points among them. Moments of tension and transition between different systems, providing new expressions of social and esthetic conventions. In general, emerging photographers are categorized in terms of their resemblance to established figures, or simply relegated as grotesque, immoral, immature, insignificant, or bourgeois, among a host of other negative descriptions. It is important for us here to give them a space, to argue their proposals, to make them visible, since they are a product of contemporary Mexican time and space. We understand the photographic image as a phenomenon of ideological transition with repercussions on the collective imaginary, in which discourse, conception, strategy, hybridization, intertextuality, transmedia, ornament, trends, expanded field, the remnant, the dominant, the emergent, circulation, market, and the validation and history of the image constantly intercross, sometimes in a contradictory way, as they attempt to generate reflection on and awareness of an apparently simple and familiar medium that turns out to be highly complex on the level of personal creation. The symptomatic and asymptomatic are encapsulated in a singular space-time at the turn of this century, like a container overfull of meanings and intertextuality. Photography constantly changes and is transformed. It is a medium that allows a society to take possession of its own time, a medium that eludes interpretation through the rapidity of the changes it undergoes and the speed with which it adapts to changes in the society that produces and consumes it. In recent years, mobile devices have become available to most people, creating a horizontal plane for the circulation of images and reconfiguring the map of the collective imaginary. We find ourselves at a historical crossroads similar to the one that existed at the birth of photography and then later when instant cameras democratized the use and consumption of the medium. As at those turning points, the technological revolution coincides with a profound social and political transformation that demands new interpretations.
375