The Ridge, is a strip of jungle that runs through New Delhi from north to south. It takes its name from its location on the hills of an ancient mountain range, the Aravalli Range. In the 19th century, The Ridge was still a barren landscape inhabited by wolves and leopards. With the aim of creating a colonial garden, the British reforested it according to the principles of English Romanticism, introducing a tree from Central America called Prosopis juliflora, an invasive species that eventually came to dominate Delhi’s native landscape. As monkeys took over the area, the colonial garden slowly transformed into a jungle. Today, it is the dark, dense heart of the Indian capital, but also a kind of no man’s land, timeless and without any clear points of reference. A place that could exist only as a vision.
For 14 years, Pablo López has been documenting this territory using the visual language of the finest 19th-century landscape documentary photography, while subtly infusing it with fully contemporary narrative, formal and thematic codes. In doing so, López captures its mystery, transforming the photographic document into something closer to an enigma than a record, and into an open door to suggestion. The Ridge thus draws on a certain form of delicate, restrained and elegant documentary neoclassicism, yet remains as timeless as it is unsettling and disturbing.