cefvigo gallery

INDOOR LANDSCAPES

The landscape has been photographed and reproducedso often it has turned into decor, an innocuous background to daily life. Photographs of spectacular views hung on the walls of shops, offices and restaurants are evidence of the distance, mediated and amplified by the conditioned gaze of photography, that separates modern man from his environment. The outdoors has become almost totally internalised and domesticated. Reduced to an acceptable image, nature is no longer boundless, but bounded by a frame and a wall.

These stereotyped, anonymous views (rarely are their locations identifiable, nor do they occasion identification, or even recognition, on the part of their viewers) represent the devaluation of the real into signs of the real. The image has become fetishized, commodified, reproduces and reduced to an imaginary referent. No longer real, it is hyperreal -"a real without origin or reality". lts purpose is not to depict a reality but to represent an ideology of pleasure and consumption. Like commodities, images have become interchangable- nobody notices the difference.

For a serious photographer like Manuel Sendón it must be frustrating (but at the same time fascinating) to observe these ubiquitous, meaningless photographic images serving such banal purposes. Yet he is also attendant to the pathos, and the ironies of the situation. He restores reality, in the sense of social reality, to this "traffic" in photography, revealing the gap between idealised image and hard reality. Men sit resigned and apathetically in a waiting room, whose wall bears a photograph of a soaring flock of birds. A group of men play cards in a corner of a bar, completely oblivious of the image of a spectacular waterfall on the wall behind them. Restaurants seduce and lull their customers with mural-sized images of lush nature, but can the same image take the minds of the waiters off the tedium of their daily round? It is as though all the images that Sendón has discovered on the walls of these places of consumption have been displaced; nowhere do they correspond with reality. The gap between reality and experience takes on grotesque, almost surreal proportions in Sendon's photographs of people posing against a background consisting of a mass produced, printed landscape. Not only are the conventions of tourist photography reproduces and subverted, but the flattening of the background also serves to emphasise the concrete, unidealised, lived reality of the person in the foreground. It is unlikely that this person has ever been to the place he or she is posing against; in any case, these places do not really exist except as images. The New York skyline serving as background to a group of youngsters playing table football is no more real or meaningful than the anodyne phrase "I love NY". Roland Barthes once defined the photograph as "a message without a code"; here it is more a question of a code without a message.

In some way the emptiness of these views displayed on walls seems to have infected the people who have to live with them. They seem at any rate unaware of the presence of these images; even less so do they appear in any way to identify with them. Perhaps they would be in danger of merging into the images' anonymous banality had not Sendon managed to notice and redeem them.

Sendón reveals the extent to which photographed images have invaded people's surroundings. As with the background "muzak" heard in supermarkets, the function of these stereotyped images is to provide a pleasant and culturally accepted accompaniment to consumption. Like Martin Parr and other British photographers who have been documenting contemporary commodity culture, Sendón draws attention to the socioeconomic contradictions and ironies that determine the "cost of living". Part of this cost is paid for in the currency of photography, in the tradicional genres that Sendón subverts and makes strange: portraiture, still life and landscape. While photographers like Martin Parr catch people in the absurd act of consumption, Sendon shows how our daily environment has already been totally invaded by the commodified image. The image has become the backdrop to life, which in turn takes on the status of a prop or actor. The "real" objects or people in Sendón's photographs serve as mute accessories within an artificial scene, a spectacle without substance. As Guy Debord has written in "Society of the Spectacle", the spectacle affirms social life as mere appearance -an appearance without reply, only passive acceptance. But Manuel Sendon does offer a reply: a gently ironic gesture of surprise at the absurd depths to which the image has descended. He shows us the incongruity that has arisen between image and reality.

Michael Gibbs