Cerca Series: Javier Ramírez Limón
Tijuana-based photographer Javier Ramírez Limón mines the ground between photography as straight journalistic document and as a source for conceptual and poetic interrogation. He attains this through breaks and alterations in the image’s representational façade that take various forms: textual application, digital manipulation and, as for this Cerca Series, the pairing of two independent bodies of work to create a third.
The exhibition presents two straight-photographic series that document different moments in the process of migration and adaptation of Mexican communities in the Southern United States. Ramírez Limón’s color portraits in the series Mexican Quinceañera capture central characters in real festivities celebrating the 15th-birthday of adolescent women living in San Diego County--the equivalent to Sweet 16 parties in the United States. These images are brought together with black-and-white landscape photos taken in an area of the Sonoran desert known as Altar--a remote and dangerous region where illegal migrants and drugs are smuggled north.
Ramírez Limón conceptualizes these pairings as a form of infiltration of the social and ethnographic content of one series into the other that makes the new work at once more informative and also more open to interpretation.
Tijuana-based photographer Javier Ramírez Limón mines the ground between photography as straight journalistic document and as a source for conceptual and poetic interrogation. He attains this through breaks and alterations in the image’s representational façade that take various forms: textual application, digital manipulation and, as for this Cerca Series, the pairing of two independent bodies of work to create a third.
The exhibition presents two straight-photographic series that document different moments in the process of migration and adaptation of Mexican communities in the Southern United States. Ramírez Limón’s color portraits in the series Mexican Quinceañera capture central characters in real festivities celebrating the 15th-birthday of adolescent women living in San Diego County--the equivalent to Sweet 16 parties in the United States. These images are brought together with black-and-white landscape photos taken in an area of the Sonoran desert known as Altar--a remote and dangerous region where illegal migrants and drugs are smuggled north.
Ramírez Limón conceptualizes these pairings as a form of infiltration of the social and ethnographic content of one series into the other that makes the new work at once more informative and also more open to interpretation. The landscapes infiltrate or seep into the cultural discourse of the Mexican Quinceañera series, becoming a backdrop to that celebration and its characters, offering a shorthand social history of a community.