piclet.org

Project Description

At the beginning of 2009 I returned to the housing developments I pictured 2 and 3 years ago. It seemed to me that the ideal of private property in Mexico had created a blindfold and I wanted to understand the human part, or the beneficiaries’ point of view, of this situation. Even though that in my initial posture of the Suburbia Mexicana project I understood it was not only in the representation of lifestyles, as many photographers have done before, where I would find a proactive work that could actually advance the visual study of the unending capitalist endeavor of urban growth, I decided to risk myself and picture the people of the city of Juarez where the population has almost tripled since 2002, and is also the home town to my family which has lived there since the end of the 19th century. Late last year, my family received the news that some of the lands where these images were taken belonged to my family and were illegally sold many years ago. This situation compelled me to pursue these portraits of the inhabitants of this particular part of the Mexican suburbia as something personal and historical that would be a closure and continuity to my previous work. Ultimately, If the city is man’s most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire and hence condemned to live in it, as Robert parks has remarked, then my commitment as a photographer is not only to denounce our need for a privately owned household, but to point the struggle our contemporary world faces between the ideals of capitalism and the strive and desire for fairer and more equal Cities in which to live in.