The Redemption of Generic City: 
"Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon."
- Jorge Luis Borges.  "The Wall and the Books."

The urban realm where my recent photographic work takes place belongs to what architect Rem Koolhaas calls The Generic City or the "geography of nowhere, a social environment without a soul", as identified by writer James Howard Kunstler.

According to Koolhaas, The Generic City is "what is left over after large sections of urban life crossed over into cyberspace"; a city "without history, without layers, superficial like a film studio, in a process of never ending self-destruction and renewal. This city is liberated from the captivity of the centre and of identity. In it, you see homogenization, endless repetitions of the same structural module, still more varied boredom, redundancy, and déjà vu, but also a city that is fractal, discontinuous, made up of enclaves, seemingly accidental and disorderly".

In the 90's, Koolhaas proposed that in these ordinary environments, traditional artistic values like composition, aesthetics and balance are irrelevant, thus discarding the notion of art creation under orthodox parameters. Indeed, three decades earlier, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown had anticipated the consequences by developing a philosophical approach that enabled them to insert their architectural work in the increasingly characterless context of "Anytown, USA". They used irony and sarcasm as the only effective antidote to avoid alienation.

This photographic exploration searches for a new approach to The Generic City. It starts by recognizing those objects worthy of further contemplation and those places that "are about to say something" (Borges). I try to reveal the concealed artistic value in these banal (and often ignored) elements, using them as sources to construct a partial, more edifying view of their world.

The formerly "unpleasant" and even "ill" are now accepted and embraced. The dying urban tissue is the preferred setting, and its illness gets scrutinized: degraded service alleyways are favored over harmonious tree-lined streets, electrical cables over clouds and abandoned industrial facilities over civic buildings. Deserted parking lots, discarded plasticwhare, domestic gas pipelines and brown fields are all passed through the filter of a vintage Polaroid SX-70 camera for a chance of redemption.

The mundane subjects (and their very states, forms, textures and colors that cause social dismissal) are "extracted" from their context, re-composed and reborn within the square frame of the Polaroid print with a new meaning: that of the "aesthetic object". Hopefully the distilled result will carry a soul, and give us a new vision not only to survive The Generic City but even find pleasure in it.