Manuel Vazquez // PHOTOGRAPHY / Traces
“to dwell means to leave traces” W. Benjamin
In a society full of prying eyes like ours, everyone can become both spectator and actor in the quotidian spectacle.
With CCTV cameras scattered in every public space our dwelling leaves traces behind, stored as visual codes.
Choreographed crowds transit the nameless global city in their daily commuting where self-absorbed pedestrians
experience the paradox of public space; between anonymity and scrutiny. Non-places are where this paradox turns
explicit and evident, and it is here where I undertook this project with the intention of constructing imaginary urban
landscapes that comment on our exposure to city life.
The project “Traces” places the spectator as a witness of a “spectacle”, built with visual traces, where the
mechanization of movement and transport are the protagonist of places where loneliness and similarity are
accentuated.
The overabundance of gazes and points of view makes the distinction between real and fiction increasingly
tenuous, as this project unfolds in that foggy and blurry boundary. Ernst Bloch´s book called traces published
in 1930 was a mixture of tales, anecdotes and incidents gathered from different sources. He described it as
“narrations of narrations” (Ribas, Xavier 2009) For Theodor Adorno “ thought which tracks down traces is
narrative” this led to storytelling where the boundary between fiction and reality may not be clear, or the
truth and fiction may be both one.
The artists intention was to alter the space and collapse time at will, his Interest was contrasting the
documentary nature of photography, searching for a different narrative than the “it has been” that has
haunted photography since its early days. The artist is as much a painter as photographer or editor.
Vazquez would say that the images are the result of a transversal cut through the course of time, which at
the end conveys his expressive intentions, his discourse, the essence of the places and his experience while
undertaking this project.
