the black snapper

The work presented here is a series of photographs of abandoned houses in Anahuac, on the north of Mexico. I have lit up the houses at night, as if they were monuments, marking its sculpture characteristics making a theatrical view of the human drama lived there. I analyze through photography their aesthetic categories and their qualities as documents and ruins. In this work I was interested in portraying a disappearing way of life through these images, and how that impacted the use of land. One of the houses was of the sister of my grandfather. The people had to flew to other areas after a drought of several years, that made impossible to keep working the fields.

My practice consists in using photography and video as a tool to experiment with the narrative aspect of images. For the past four years I have been exploring with the use of light in night scenes, portraying simple and functional spaces in the outside of big cities. Places that give a filling of perplexity or enigma, where light plays a very important part. Using it as a metaphor of meaning and human reason, I contrast it with the unknown or uncanny of the deep black surroundings. I stage a scene of transcendental anonymity; exploring ways to communicate with the narrativity of our unconscious, and the way it works deciphering the images we consume.

I have used a set of movable light devices that I convey to the places to be photographed. The devices are included in the final image of spaces or landscapes. The light becomes then the media that allow us to see what there is in the real world. I’m exaggerating the common phenomenon of light and seeing, making a re-enactment of those processes through photography, contrasting light with the deep black night, as the wilderness. The landscapes or spaces erupt from nothingness as an image of human meaning, as deliriant architecture, questioning the barrier we tend to set between nature and knowledge.

I’m also interested in using the political charge of the spaces. The work presented here is an example of that approach. Peasants are forced to leave their houses because of the lack of agricultural politics against voracious transnational companies, that absorb all the resources available. The people have to move out to bigger cities or to the USA, leaving behind the houses they own. These houses are subsequently taken over by the wilderness, a few years later, they are all covered in grass. The light devices spot them as a discovery, like contemporary ruins; showing the human leftovers of political decisions.

I’m interested in how light works as an instrument that defines a place and charges it with a meaning. As a narrative consequence of the arrangement of the light, the place portrayed, immediately becomes safe or dangerous, populated or wild. There is a threat of something wrong about to happen that never arrives but tints the scene of awareness and narration. The idea is to set an ambiguous atmosphere where reality and staged fiction collapse together. The night becomes thus a metaphor of idleness, ambiguity and disruption.

Oswaldo Ruiz on the web: oswaldoruiz.com.