The Street Becomes
by Jaime Permuth

portfolio winners call 'URBANAUTICA INSTITUTE AWARDS 2020', 2020
Category: Memories and Traditions


In the Summer of 2014 I spent two months in residence as a Smithsonian Artist Fellow. During my time in DC, I researched, gathered and secured permissions for all the source materials I required for creating a new book and exhibition project entitled "The Street Becomes". The project is interested in the changing character of the urban street in times of war and peace. "The Street Becomes" is entirely based on archival images by other photographers. One part of the images comes from the private archives of local Washington DC photographers who documented the Latino Festival during the 70s and 80s. The second part comes from the US Marine Corps archives and documents the American military occupation of Central America and the Caribbean in the early 20th Century. My artistic intervention and repurposing of these source images suggests new meanings for the street and examines the kind of contests that are predicated on overtaking and controlling public spaces. "The Street Becomes" is a metaphorical construct whose extension maps the interrelation of war; displacement; immigration; assimilation and cultural resistance. Aesthetically, the book moves by juxtaposing images from both archives to create a sense of the cyclical transformations that convulse the urban street, as it moves from peace to violence and viceversa. Artistically, one of the fundamental challenges was to find a visual language that could reconcile such disparate image styles: on the one hand, the cumbersome turn of the 20th Century large-format cameras used by the US Marine Corps; on the other, the vastly more agile 35mm format favored by DC photographers covering the Latino Festival seventy years later. To this end, the source photographs were altered through a mix of digital and analog techniques to strip them of their original tonal range and much of their mid-tone information. The resulting, denatured images, tend more towards abstraction and accentuate gestural and emotional elements over the more strictly indexical and factual information in the originals. *** "The Street Becomes" will be published as a monograph in Spring/Summer 2021 by Meteoro Editions in Amsterdam. Previous to signing on with Meteoro, the book dummy for the project was a Finalist in three international competitions: Getxo Photo Open Call (Getxo, Spain), Fiebre Photobook Festival (Madrid, Spain) and FELIFA (Buenos Aires, Argentina). In 2017 a selection of works was presented by El Museo del Barrio as part of the exhibition “nasty women / bad hombres”. In 2018 twenty four works from the series where exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno in Guatemala.


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