The city and the mask, the Caracas of Aaron Sosa.
What does one think of when one thinks of Caracas? When one is far away? When one doesn't know it? When one is there, experiencing home and climate? It is complex and useless to try to define this city, this geography trapped between mountains, this mixture of different bloods, languages, idiosyncracies, and cultures.
Caracas as photographed by Sosa has taken off the "mask" to become a "face"....
more »The city and the mask, the Caracas of Aaron Sosa.
What does one think of when one thinks of Caracas? When one is far away? When one doesn't know it? When one is there, experiencing home and climate? It is complex and useless to try to define this city, this geography trapped between mountains, this mixture of different bloods, languages, idiosyncracies, and cultures.
Caracas as photographed by Sosa has taken off the "mask" to become a "face". Before him, the city strips and reveals its most intimate truths. It tells little secrets to the camera of this oblique spectator, of this artisan of shadows and reflections. His images perfectly define that lapidary phrase of "mirrors and windows" spoken by photography critic John Szarkowski and what was the title for what continues to be, perhaps, his most famous essay. Not only because for Sosa photography is a window where the image of his soul is projected, but rather - and above everything - because he uses these elements as a tool to make up a Caracas that reveals itself in its smallest details. Details that reunite, pertinently, the phases and face of an endless space and life, in eternal construction.
The typical symbols of identity of Caracas will not be found here; they are not typical postcard images. There are no Central Park towers, Bolivar Square, or Misses with a crown and sparkles. Sosa's photographs deconstruct the myth in order to seize the reality of a city that, like all cities, always exceeds the drama of the representations even when the photograph itself is a representation.
In this particular case, the discovery of a difficult city, that hides horrors behind the beauty and beauty behind the terrible. His photographs are proof of this, of what he reveals by hiding and hides by revealing. It's a Caracas that sometimes splits open the masks to expose the changeable truth of its face.
Kelly Martínez.
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