Familiar Landscapes
2017
"Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
For twenty-five years I have been describing Cádiz without naming it.
Not consciously. But the city you leave at twenty becomes the invisible measure of every city you encounter afterward, the standard against which other streets are compared, other waterfronts assessed, other people's relationship to where they live understood. You carry it with you not as a memory exactly but as a calibration: the thing against which everything else is set. Other cities are loud or quiet or dense or open relative to it. You do not notice you are doing this until you go back.
Familiar Landscapes began as a return and became an investigation into what returning reveals, which is not what the place has become but the gap between two cities that share the same geography. One is the city that exists: contracted, post-crisis, its population twenty percent smaller than it was, a bridge finally opened in 2015 that promised regeneration and delivered, thus far, mainly the evidence that the problems were never topographic. The other is the city preserved inside me at the moment of departure in 1992, used for a quarter of a century as an unconscious reference point and therefore never allowed to age or change or lose anyone.
These two cities do not match. They cannot. The real Cádiz continued without me, it declined, adapted, lost people, built a bridge, waited, while the internal city remained fixed, populated by people who have since moved or died or changed beyond recognition, lit by a particular Atlantic light that memory has almost certainly altered. When I returned and pointed the camera at the streets I grew up in, I could not determine which city I was recording. The camera cannot make that distinction either. This is the central difficulty of photographing a place you have known, the image is always contaminated by what you knew it to be.
Cádiz is also a city that understands departure from the inside. It is not merely that I left, an entire generation left, drawn away by unemployment rates that reached forty percent, by the weight of a city whose economy never recovered from the double blow of deindustrialisation and financial crisis. The city I returned to is shaped not only by what is there but by the accumulated absence of everyone who carried their own version of it elsewhere. I am photographing a place constituted partly by the people who are no longer photographable in it, whose departure is present in the empty bars, the closed shopfronts, the streets that are quieter than they should be in summer.
The bridge that was supposed to change this opened and did not change it. That is perhaps the most precise image the project found, not a photograph but a fact. Infrastructure built on the assumption that Cádiz's isolation was geographic. The isolation remained. Which means it was never geographic.
Marco Polo told Kublai Khan about every city except Venice because Venice was the only city he could not see from the outside. You cannot describe what you are made of. You can only notice, returning, that everything you thought you were describing was it all along, the familiar landscape underneath every other landscape, the city you left that never stopped being the city you were in.
