From the start of its invention, photography has closely studied urban scenes. More than one hundred and fifty years have passed and this study has propagated one of contemporary art’s artistic production’s most important sources: the city.

However, the journey has been long both for the genre, and urbanisation development. Such documentary evidence that initially was limited to demonstrating architecture has now converted into a complex language on the perception of the life of the individual and the interrelation with the surrounding environment.

And it is in this wide trajectory, the configuration of the city has changed radically more perhaps than photography itself. Today we talk of urban centres, megalopolis inhabited by millions of people where everyday life seems to have collapsed vis-à-vis the imminent density of “life”. Our space has been reduced, the city has been closed off and this enclosure seems to be fomenting a new illness, another of the many appearing in our time: urban claustrophobia’. As well as being a psychological affliction, this illness presents symptoms of anxiety and prejudices human physical and mental health. That intense fear that vulnerable state when facing the consequences of being in an enclosed space can now be extrapolated to a larger scale of the dimension which we inhabit. And furthermore we can frame (or perhaps amplify?) to a photographic scale not only by means of its condition of possessing a portion of time, but also moreover of space in which almost everything fits. So much so, that like the hypermodern place, that of a timeless and placeless subject; that of the ‘city contained’.

Exhibition held at Vertice Gallery (Lima).