Ngelmarcos

Fascination with the urban landscape in flux has been the dominant theme in the work of Ángel Marcos throughout his career. Even his early work, Paisajes (Landscapes, 1997), which depicted a more rural setting, included man-made artifacts. His work on New York and Cuba features much more urban work depicting change in progress as manifest in his images. His recent images from China taken in 2007 are an attempt to fix the rapid-fire transformation of Chinese society by fixing the mega-cities of Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong onto photographic paper and to examine the internal contradictions of China’s frenetic race to embrace economic development.
Marcos is, like many other western photographers, awed by the scale and pace of change in China. His photographs, however, contain artifacts of the older, more traditional China not yet submerged or eliminated in this new “great leap forward.” In several of his images we see where the old wooden buildings have been taken down to make way for new towers like those looming in the background. Mao, in his rush to re-make China in the nineteen-fifties said, that “one must destroy in order to build; with the word destruction in mind, one is already building.” The human cost involved was not a consideration. One can see this in another image where people camp in a desolate field at the edge of another set of towers. Millions of people have been displaced by the great dams and by the new construction of the cities. Millions have flocked from the countryside to work in the factories or to construct the new buildings. Yet with the arbitrary ease of power, once the job is done—as with the construction of the Olympic venues—the workers are “invited to return home.”
Marcos is aware of these contradictions. His photography of the “New China” almost invariably includes a human element, tiny figures scurrying about their lives in the shadowy smog beneath the towers. A traditional boat is transformed into a luminous advertisement for none other than Kentucky Fried Chicken, fast food having become a fashion statement for the nouveau riches of the big cities. Marcos uses the camera as an archeologist would when collecting evidence of a particular site. The camera allows him to fix details of change, sometimes venturing into the traditional alleyways and courtyards of soon-to-be-destroyed areas of the cities whose new buildings exemplify all that is apparently modern and powerful. He pays special attention to the vibrant mix of signs—billboards, posters, plasma screens—that refract the chaos of change in today’s China. (It is not surprising that his next project was an examination of Las Vegas, that nexus of American capitalism run rampant, with its glitter and dust.)
China today is in total flux. The authorities maintain their grip on power in the face of myriad decentering forces of new, moneyed elites and a growing middle class, the rise of the Internet and exposure to other ways of living through travel. The traditional harmony of China, its landscapes, and its social orders, are being shattered and overturned. Marcos has captured these moments of transition by fixing on paper the disappearance of what once was and the emergence of what will be. As if to echo Roland Barthes who argued that photography was always already implicated by death and disappearance, the scenes that Marcos shows will never be seen again.