Estrella barco, 2019, from Fordlândia9

60 x 50 cm

Edition of 10 + 2 APs

C-type prints on 308 gram Hahnemühle Photo Rag archival paper

Signed by the artist

Prices start at €800

 

For print enquiries, contact:
tom@opendoors.gallery

Description

Juan Miguel Ramírez-Suassi is a self taught photographer who was born in Mallorca (Spain) and now lives and works in Madrid. His photographs, which at first sight appear to fit seamlessly into the great nowhere, involve many visits to the same landscapes to observe the change year after year. His work occupies an ambiguous position somewhere between portraiture and social landscape. Juan has published two critically acclaimed series so far, both of which are represented below. One Eyed Ulysses (2018) which is part of an ongoing trilogy and Fordlândia9 (2020).

I always return to the same places over and over again, until I get used to a kind of cycle of illusion, disenchantment and recidivism in which I am capable to understand myself through the images captured.
– Juan Miguel Ramírez-Suassi

 

Fordlândia9

The Amazon is much more than a river. It is the visible appearance, infinitely rich in analogies, of the reality of things. This seems obvious, when poetic languages intervenes to describe reality, the latter loses its documentary sharpness and is converted into a creative fantasy, especially in the specific sense that the river embodies the ironic and sombre essence of the universe.

I have contemplated this river and its affluents in small doses, and small steps, because like a bashful child, it only showed its epidermis; this I found irritating. But traveling so sedately meant that all that surrounded me remained hidden until the river itself disgorged all its “splendours” along its various stretches: globetrotters, beggars, preachers, drunken aborigines, ruined foremen, minor politicians, lumberjacks, monks, soldiers, melancholic prostitutes… I find it strange that the beautiful image of this river, is in reality a beautiful imperfection. And Fordlândia, Henry Ford’s attempt to transform the jungle into a fantasy of the American Mid West, is the perfect imperfection: a perfect failure of the American Way of Life.

Contact us for the full series of images from this project.

All print enquires:
tom@opendoors.gallery

You may also like…