Thursday 25 September 2008

Manuel Vazquez
























All images ©Manuel Vazquez

Manuel Vazquez has been on my list of people to write about for ages but for one reason or another I just haven´t got round to linking him until now. A recent graduate on the MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths College, London this Colombian-born photographer´s work "researches the visual traces that are left in public spaces. In our daily lives we dwell in public places, where our journeys are filmed and stored as CCTV records. The omnipresence of the gaze of surveillance turns the city into a spectacle, and us into actors. Traces looks at the city as a theatrical scenario created with those visual codes , a “theatrum mundi”. Here, each image is a montage of single photographs where the “mise en scene” is deliberated, composed, and where the deep black canvas is an allegory to the city where commuters are continuously under the spotlight."