Pablo López Luz
I just question the actual idea of the border, and the actual idea of building a bigger, taller, stronger wall. Once you’ve seen both of our countries from above, from my perspective, you realize how absurd it all is.”
-Pablo López Luz, 2017, Travel and Leisure
Pablo López Luz grew up in an artistic family, learning about celebrated Mexican photographers such as Graciela Iturbide, who had a significant impact on Luz as a young artist. In 2006, after studying communications, he earned a Master’s degree in Art at New York University and the International Center of Photography in New York. Luz’s work often references the Mexican landscape tradition. He is best known for his aerial photographs of Mexico City, a megalopolis in the process of constant mutation, of rapid and chaotic growth. He has also explored the links between history and the contemporary world, especially the question of Mexican national identity.
The Escalette Collection has two works from Luz’s Frontera series (2014-2015) which explores the landscape of the Mexico – US border from – literally- a new perspective. These photographs, shot on helicopter flights that spanned 1,295 miles, are intended to disrupt the dominant narrative of the border as a zone of contention, and open up a new visual paradigm to reinterpret our understanding of “the border.” From above, the border wall is seen as only a small, man-made blemish, a scratch on the face of an otherwise whole, pristine landscape. From above, it’s nearly impossible to know which side of the border is which, a disorienting effect that points to the contrived meanings and significance that we as humans have attached to this unnatural, constructed object. In his book Frontera, Luz was also interested in exploring the naive idea of order and separation that borders falsely provide; in trying to construct order within the landscape, humans have paradoxically created a source of disorder, chaos, and violence that plagues the people living around it. Luz says he often wonders if there were no human borders, would the conflicts we hear about so often in the news (i.e. illegal immigration, drug and human trafficking, narco-wars, sex tourism, etc.) even exist.
