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LUMINOUS WINDOWS
The first image in the history of photography, still preserved, was
taken in 1827 by Joseph Nicephore Niepce. Standing by the window of
his studio he captured, on a polished pewter plate, a view of the
roofs of the farm in Le Gras; in order to obtain such an image, it took
him eight hours of exposure to sunlight.
The next definite step would arrive in 1835, when Fox Talbot
obtained the first negative on paper: a view from the window of his
home in Lacock Abbey.
In these early days of photography, the creators
of
images had
to arm themselves with, besides their camera and equipment, enormous
amounts of patience in order to capture images that would last.
Hours of experimenting with silver salts, bromides, iodides and many
other substances were used to improve the techniques in an effort to
reduce the time involved in the realization of the images. At the
same time, durability was improved such that even today part of our
visual history is preserved.
Recent technological advances for the capturing of images have been
countless. Stepping from analog photography to digital photography
dramatically revolutionized many concepts in photography. Time is
not fundamental anymore; we can take a picture and immediately we
can see it, print it, keep it or discard it. The hours dedicated to
work in the lab are just a memory now, or belong to the stubbornness
of some photographers who continue their dedication to the main
ingredient in photography: time.
We have gained speed, hours of work are saved and consequently the
amount of images to which we are exposed each day have been
multiplied in a way that we barely allow ourselves to stop to see
just one. We are part, in the words of Italo Calvino, a "humanity
increasingly flooded by a deluge of prefabricated images".
The work presented by Lucía Messeguer in this exhibit gives us time
to breathe in this race of images... she invites us to stop and look
and read each one of the photographs, taken with the patience of the
first makers of images. She moves us to reflect, presenting us with
three powerful portfolios that generate in us, as spectators, a set
of mixed and contrasting emotions. The first is a compilation of
images taken in two concentration camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau; the
second comprises landscapes of Forch, in Switzerland, "a piece of
land, warm and alluring", in the words of the artist; the third
Hokkaido, men against nature for survival. Messeguer has chosen
three places loaded with energy: the first one with the energy left
by pain, solitude and helplessness; the second filled with peace
which moves us to contemplation. Hokkaido is
poetical, sublime.
To discover why the artist
put these three works together in one exhibition is itself part of
the exhibition and of our own reflections. Nevertheless the
artist leaves clues that as spectators we slowly follow.
In the series of
Auschwitz/Birkenau, Lucía documents and gives testimony to the
architecture that housed the destruction of human beings: walls
invaded with faceless presence, which still stand to remind us of
that which we should never forget.
The tracks of a railroad
without return front the Auschwitz complex. The artist makes us walk
around the exterior to little by little introduce us inside the
barracks where so many stories ended. Those who survived
started all over again, carrying with them the indelible mark of
this terrible piece of history. Before and after Auschwitz:
nothing would be the same. Among them, writer and Nobel Prize
Winner, Imre Kertèsz, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchewald describes these
camps as the "utmost truth of degradation of human beings in modern
history".
Within the interiors of
Auschwitz buildings, the eye of the photographer looks for windows,
a recurrent element during her journey as an artist. Here, she
transforms them in a presence that reveals itself through the light
that passes through them, is reflected and looks for a way out. It
is through them that we find the illusion of freedom, the hope for
survival.
Lucía then stops at a spot
in Forch, facing the naturalist landscape: a genre that has been
unjustly forgotten and substituted by urban landscape in
contemporary photography.
Alfred Stieglitz, an American photographer
known for his series of images of clouds called Equivalents, once
said: "photography besides being a document should be the expression
and the feeling of the photographer. Messeguer blends herself
with Forch, and captures the light in these points of meridian
connections located a few kilometers from Zurich. She explores the
landscape over the course of one year, stopping time, and then
letting it pass by. The landscape is never the same. It is
renewed every instant, it changes, it is transformed. In the
act of taking the photograph Messeguer is meditating, fragmenting,
and then selecting parts of a whole: infinity.
 Dr. Viktor Frankl, another
Auschwitz survivor, narrates
the story of a young woman whose death
he witnessed. This young woman knew that the end of her life was
near and she told him, as she pointed out a tree that could be seen
through the window of a barrack, "That tree is the only friend I've
got in this solitude; I talk to it many times". When Dr. Frankl
asked the young woman what the tree told her, she answered: "It
tells me: I am here, I am here, I am the life, the eternal life."
So Messeguer, with the
images of Auschwitz/Birkenau, Forch and Hokkaido, displays human
deterioration, while at the same time, opens up for us luminous
windows to peace, to reflection, a mystical contemplation of
nature.
Cristina Kahlo
México City, July 2004
Translated by Ariel Velasquez
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