Perfect Day
What Remains of the Landscape
While popular culture seduces us with the myth of an untamed nature in which to escape the frustrations of everyday life, our more common experience keeps us tied either to mass tourism or to fleeting getaways to places that are simply what remains of the past. Landscape: remnants of what was once countryside, now encroached upon by industry, housing developments, and retail parks. Appropriated out of necessity and transformed through sheer resilience, these places have been reclaimed from their inhospitable condition to become plausible alternatives where we can still enjoy a little leisure time under the sun, away from the bustle of the city.
It is precisely these places of leisure in post-industrial society that interest Txema Salvans, whose images highlight their surreal banality and sharpen the amusing sense of strangeness they generate. He achieves this through two rhetorical devices. First, by maintaining a viewpoint distant enough to give precedence to the scene and its surroundings over individual subjects and their expressions; and second, and more importantly, through the mechanism of ellipsis. Most of the photographs were taken on the beach or near the sea, and it is therefore the sea that explains the presence of people swimming, fishing, or playing in the sand. And yet the sea is always invisible, because Salvans positions himself between the water and his subjects, reversing the direction of their gaze. As a result, what the camera shows us is the degraded view to which the figures wish to turn their backs. To turn one’s back on something is to ignore it, even to pretend that it does not exist.
Salvans’s work therefore speaks to us of the collective delusion that leads us to fantasise about these fleeting fragments of paradise. Since we have no way of knowing whether another paradise is possible, we settle for these moments of tranquillity and even happiness amid concrete and factories. But his work also speaks of a paradox in the politics of vision. The paradox is that we, as viewers of the photographs, are denied the possibility of seeing what the people in the images want to see, while what is thrust before our eyes is precisely what they do not want to see. It is Salvans who controls the terms of this dialectic, and in doing so demonstrates, as Nietzsche maintained, that there are no facts, only interpretations.
Joan Fontcuberta