City and Landscape

One of the features of the  J.R. Plaza photographic archive is that it has hardly any images without human beings in them, even if seen at a distance. Family collections tend to give priority to individual portraits and group scenes over landscapes or architecture. For this reason Bonillas was especially drawn to two black and white images found amidst the pages of the albums that appeared to be from a different collection than his grandfather’s: an open shot of the desert (possibly from the one in San Luis Potosí, in Mexico), and a view of the Ciudad Universitaria (found in the capital district).

In principle, this is a work that deals with the longstanding split between city and nature (the conflict between what has been built and arranged by man and what has not; or man’s obsession with filling everything that might appear to be “empty”, like the desert: a horror vacui). To accomplish this, the artist took as his starting point this pair of pictures where the city and the landscape are represented in exemplary fashion: on the one hand, there is the Ciudad Universitaria, the highest point of Mexican urban planning; on the other, the desert, the maximum expression of emptiness. From this point on, Bonillas set out to bring together 80 images (corresponding to the number of slots in his slide projector carrousel) that would make it possible for him to delve more deeply into this antagonistic relationship.

In a second reading, however, Ciudad y paisaje is also a study of photography as a medium whose identity depends on the tension between unique images and sequences: its reproducibility. However, the duplication does not come here from the negative, an infinite matrix. Instead, the original vision is echoed by other images, as if photography worked not by means of a successive repetition but by a regeneration that draws the image into its most distilled state, in a kind of self-recognizing journey. In this case this occurs doubly: as the various natural landscapes and buildings of the university campus appear, it becomes more and more clear that they are two perspectives of the same landscape: now empty, now full.