Journeys Through Art & Film

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick takes us through the cosmos following David Bowman, the astronaut who, on the last leg of his journey, goes beyond the borders of our solar system to enter an unknown place. 

Moving at high speed through countless psychedelic landscapes, which we recognize through his gaze, he reminds us that, at night, by looking up at a clear sky and observing the universe, we can encompass all possible times and places.

Nowadays, the image is our navigation chart to locate ourselves and to get to all places. It allows us to travel through space-time or settle in realities different from the one where we find ourselves.

While artists transform a territory into a landscape by capturing it on a work of art, making us aware of its qualities in a concise and individualized way,

the media has made it possible to summon large audiences to imagine fantastic trips and places—as happened with the films Barbarella, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz; 

or impossible time jumps, like those of Tony Newman and Douglas Phillips, the protagonists of the television series The Time Tunnel.

Just as the advent of the locomotive and, later, the automobile and the airplane reinforced the ability to observe the world at different speeds and from different locations, 

the invention of the camera forever changed the way artists look and, with it, our way of understanding the landscape.

A unique precedent in this process took place in the 20th century, when the movement called new Objectivity—emerged in Germany during the interwar period—made accuracy in the image one of its paradigms. 

Albert Renger-Patszch, one of its greatest representatives, then produced abstract images, antecedents of the work of Lázaro Blanco, Franco Fontana, Esteban Pastorino or Diego Pérez, who, at different times, have made the landscape their field of visual experimentation.

Travel not only involves the subjective contemplation of the place visited, but also the desire to get to know other realities, as happens with traveling photographers, 

who have taken advantage of the portability of the camera to record other places, those places where the ideals of the Western world are changed. 

Manuel Álvarez Bravo was especially fond of this tradition, perhaps due to the cultural condition of Mexico itself, which has made it one of the most visited countries by photographers from all over the world, who come searching for the myth of the lost paradise through the record of its landscape.

The records of ruins and cities, as well as the dawn of modernization in Mexico, made by Alfred Briquet, William Henry Jackson, Augustus Le Plongeon and Charles B. Waite

and the later images of Hugo Brehme, Paul Strand, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Bernard Plossu, among others, integrate an intermediary conception of the Mexican dream or interrupted thought,

as J. M. G. Le Clézio defined the place where the myths of a powerful indigenous past foreign to the West persist despite their defeat by the forces of modernity.

In parallel to these foreign authors, Mexican photographers such as Lola Álvarez Bravo and Armando Salas Portugal traveled across the country for much of the 20th century, expanding and refining with their images the ideas about the cultures that make it up. 

Of all the fictions that cross this territory, that of the border between Mexico and the United States has been the most productive, creating an iconography that portrays the intense and conflictive exchanges between the indigenous and European imaginaries,

and between Anglo-Saxon and Latin American culture, as shown in the romantic images of the North American Indians by Edward Curtis, 

the staging of a trip through the West in the film Stagecoach, by John Ford, as well as the hybrid rituals and contrasts of popular Mexican-American iconography taken by Eniac Martínez and Rubén Ortiz.

In the sixties, Wyatt (Denis Hopper) and Billy (Peter Fonda), the protagonists of the film Easy Rider, crossed the northern part of the border on a motorcycle, from California to New Orleans, 

challenging the self-complacent rigidity of American life and endorsing the adventures of the legendary car trips, undertaken years before by the members of the beat generation. 

Under the same sixties atmosphere, the characters from Los caifanes, a film directed by Juan Ibáñez, undertook an urban journey through Mexico City, challenging the conventions of the time.

And reminding us that, by night, all spaces can be opened to the imagination.