A journey through the streets of the welfare state, about “Main Street, 0”

“Main Street, 0”constitutes the negative of the official discourse which proclaims that we live in the best possible social system (as combination of both economic and political system).

Gran-Via-0-

effect-of-immigration-on-wage-inflation

fragment – Igor Calvo

The images comprising “Main Street, 0” embarrass and upset beyond of what they show, as they imply a great disassociation between what we accept as reality or fiction and what truly can be found of both notions in our real world. 
Thus, “Main Street, 0” stands also as metaphor of a world separated by a huge breakthrough between the discourse (what the mass media tell us) and the reality, a society torn between accepting the image of the world as offered by the official mass media and the one we all can see when walking through our city just by learning to look at it a little bit more carefully.

“Main Street, 0” is made up of documentary photographs showing real people who develop their life in the streets, in that public space used by the rest of citizens as a mere transit zone. Each photograph is “completed” with pre-existing textual messages obtained from reports of the IMF or the European Parliament that play a fundamental role in the making up of the final image, a combination that questions the reality or fiction of both “documents”.

That is to say, when taken separately, both photographs and texts, are “real”, as they lack of any kind of manipulation. However, neither the texts explain or describe the content of the photographs, nor the photographs are useful to understand or complete the texts.

The resulting image can be thus translated as a condemnation of the reduction of people’s lives to a collection of economic laws that dictate their viability or profitability. It is, also, a verification of how in the society of the spectacle the truthful analysis of the reality is substituted by the political and economic fictions of the elites.

A first foray by the author into black&white photography and another step in the line of investigation began with “Postcode” (2012) and continued in “Unsustainable urbanization processes following regressive strategies” (2012), through which photography is used as a tool to put into question the processes of reality and fiction on which modern urban societies are sustained.

"Main Street, 0", exhibition and +info at PhotoArte Komite on-line Art Gallery