Entrance to Exhibition. Photo: © Milagros González

The first step into the exhibition is a plunge into the unknown. Visitors are greeted by a large-format photograph by Thomas Struth, which dramatically shifts their perspective from observer to observed. This moment challenges the notion of photography as a mere tool for capturing reality, prompting questions: What is reality? What is truth? This section contrasts masters like Louis Faurer, André Kertész, and Arthur Leipzig with contemporary artists such as Candida Höfer, Vik Muniz, and Thomas Struth. The pioneers, who transitioned from photojournalism to art photography, reveal the intimacy of public moments—evident in Kertész’s spontaneous images of musicians in New York City or Leipzig’s photographs of mine workers’ weddings. Contemporary artists, meanwhile, turn the gaze onto the viewer, exploring architectural spaces and demonstrating how the artist’s eye can shape reality. This shift in perspective sets the tone for the next room.

Here, visitors move from observing the intimacy of others in public spaces to encountering the artist’s private world embodied in the work. The image is both represented and performed before the camera, elusive yet palpable through the physicality of the artist’s body and the illusion of truth captured in theatrical, performative gestures. At first glance, these photographs may seem to document a performance, but they do more. They extend an action across time and space, with the artist’s gesture striking the viewer like a memento mori, grounding them in the present with the force of a revelation. Artists such as Consuelo Castañeda, Liliana Porter, Marina Abramović, Tania Bruguera, María Teresa Hincapié, and Cindy Sherman feature in this section. While Abramović, Bruguera, and Hincapié star in their own performances, Castañeda’s A Story in Seventy Pages portrays her mother unposed, capturing signs of aging in snapshots that form a poignant visual inventory.

Installation View of one of the rooms of the exhibition. Photo: © Milagros González

Ana Mendieta’s Untitled (Body Print) serves as a bridge to the next room, which explores the use of image sequences (the grid) to convey concepts. This section presents images—fragments, sequences, repetitions—that compose an intimate narrative, akin to sequences of DNA. Works by Mike Kelley, Joseph Kosuth, and Oscar Muñoz, among others, create individual universes where the orthogonal structure of the grid acts as scaffolding for the artist’s storytelling.

The following room positions the photographer as a “character witness,” armed with the camera’s privileged point of view. The distance between subject and artist, as captured by the lens, reveals social dynamics within communities. Works like Jonathas de Andrade’s Eu, Mestiço or Thania Petersen’s Queen Colonialists and Her Weapons of Mass Destruction harness the power of the image to highlight social issues often overlooked.

The landscape, as both an object of fascination and a catalyst for visual narratives, takes center stage in the next segment, featuring works from the PAMM collection. Themes of resilience, harmony, imbalance, loneliness, death, and life emerge as if from a natural history book. Teresa Margolles records rural landscapes with obsessive precision, often featuring trees as a recurring motif. Yet, at the base of each tree, her work reveals a humble memorial for someone murdered on a perilous road in her native Mexico. Similarly, Isaac Julien’s Emerald City / Capital (Playtime) depicts an idyllic Dubai desert, with a woman on the left and a promising city on the right. But instead of hope, the image conveys the isolation of an immigrant domestic worker in a solitary, alienating context.

From natural landscapes, the exhibition shifts to the urban scene, suggesting that, through the camera’s lens, architecture becomes more than mere construction. These artworks portray buildings as containers of memory, witnesses to social, political, or moral decay. Carlos Garaicoa, for instance, depicts a ruined building in Havana as a decaying structure, a utopian vision visible only under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The exhibition concludes with photography as a tool for creating and constructing images imbued with meaning and memory.

This exhibition offers a profound exploration of the photographic image as a generator of language. The curators dissect each artist’s perspective with surgical precision, and visitors follow the narrative thread, learning a new visual vocabulary as they move through the space. They may grasp, memorize, or discard elements that resonate or fail to captivate. The artists’ discourse permeates the exhibition, and the language of the image offers endless possibilities, inviting visitors to read it and make it their own.

Artworks Photo Gallery (All photos © William Riera)