SCAN PHOTOBOOKS: "El que és possible també és realitat", by Natasha Christia

If the history of photography had to be summarised in a single area, it would undoubtedly be in the city photobook. On its double spreads, the genres of city symphonies, the Japanese Provoke movement, and street photography, with its ethos of the flâneur, invoked and conjured the photogenic city. Described by historian Françoise Choay as a “two-faced metropolis, a mother and a castrator, an effigy of both progress and perversion,” the city turned into a stage for the melancholy and even the despair that accompanied the experience of the industrial and post industrial eras.

The Possible is also Reality acknowledges this legacy, choosing, however, to shift its focus towards the bowels of the globalised and hyper-connected city of our times. Rather than using images as mere reproductions of what is already visible, the publications showcased here bring new visualities to the surface. At the same time, they suggest that within documentary practices, imaginaries that do not aim to totalise are possible. 

The photobooks selected in The Possible is also Reality forge unexpected spaces of engagement. Their themes are linked to the idea of marginality. The city is understood here as a result of political imagination, incessantly subjected to a dialectical process of experimentation, inclusion and exclusion in terms of organization and coexistence. Viewed as an enclave of flows and differences, the city cannot be conceived without its banlieues and/or global peripheries, nor without the decentralisation, relocation and abstract collectivities that are experienced in daily life. There are no longer peripheries and centres, first or second-hand metropolises; it is rather diasporas and the subaltern what gives rise to identities. 

The methodologies established within these publications break away from the camera vs. world binary, prioritise collaborative and speculative modes, and invite reflection on the potential uses and purposes of images. They do not merely outline horizons of collective emancipation and transformation, but rather put them to the test in the present. They perform the constant push and pull of different practices of connection that occur simultaneously among the urban space and the communities that inhabit it, often without reaching a definitive consensus. Their visual strategies embrace voices of resistance, resilience, non-normativity and transgression in the face of local and global programmatic forces that seek to regulate biopolitical and environmental divisions and hierarchies. 

Their critical positions, which are utopian at heart, pave the way towards a landscape of coexistence that transcends reality. They call, paraphrasing philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre in Urban Revolution (1970), for us to stop viewing the cities we create and those we imagine as two different entities, since “the possible is also reality.”

Curated by Natasha Christia.