The New York Photo Review

Urban Speed

Cities are obviously the place to be: half of the world’s population of seven billion now live within urban spaces and the number of city dwellers continues to increase steadily. With this fact in mind, Martin Roemers has been documenting the world’s megacities (those with a population of several million) for a number of years. The cities he has chosen to display at Anastasia Photo are from the Third World, many of them quite old but now experiencing rapid growth. To capture the dynamism of these changing environments, one might say he has adopted an old technique – time exposures – but taken on medium format film from a vantage point high above the crowded streets and intersections and then scanned for printing with an archival pigment process. The results are eleven lush color prints mounted in simple black frames, without the isolating effect of mats (a portfolio of additional images is also available for viewing).

In photography’s earliest days, time exposures were necessitated by the limitations of the medium and not an aesthetic choice. Cityscapes – both domestic and exotic – often appeared strangely empty, with maybe a few slow- moving wanderers recognizable among the subtly steaming shades of gray in the monochrome print. In Roemers’ images, however, the color is vibrant and chaotic and the scenes are crowded. Abstract streams of vehicles and/or bodies flow sinuously around pockets of stasis in which the viewer can interpolate stories about these city dwellers (that man standing so close to the train speeding past; all those vehicles stopped in the road surrounded by blurred bodies).

The energy in these environments is tangible to the viewer. Despite exotic details such as open-air markets, rickshaws, and camels, these are lively, modern urban spaces with a mass of motor transport (the stasis often dictated by traffic signals). In a number of these photos I see echoes of the urban images in Sebastiao Salgado’s monochromatic Migrations series. This element of time passing quickly in “Metropolis” differs markedly from Roemers’ other series in progress. While “Relics of the Cold War” is also in color, those images of the former Eastern bloc are sharply focused and still, as are his monochromatic series of portraits of WWII survivors (“The Eyes of War” and “The Never-Ending War”).

The prints on display are not oversized – most are 22 x 28 in., a quite manageable size for viewing or hanging on a typical home wall (only one is larger at 49 x 63 in.). Maybe it is due to the fact that Anastasia Photo focuses on documentary and photojournalistic photography, but I appreciate that they have resisted the urge to overpower the viewer with a multitude of oversized prints, a practice that has become prevalent in a number of art galleries.

Metropolis
Martin Roemers at Anastasia Photo 29 February – 14 April 2012 http://www.anastasia-photo.com/

Reviewed by Ed Barnas. Apr. 18, 2012