Book Award Finalists: Pablo Lopez Luz

© Pablo Lopez Luz, Carretera Mexico - Cuernavaca, 2007

I feel like I should apologize here... to both you and our next Book Award Finalist, Pablo Lopez Luz. You see, small jpegs on the web just don't do this work justice. This work is about scale, but I'm afraid this blog can only handle these small little jpegs. Well, click on these to blow them up a little more and look close... as they grow larger, you get smaller.

That is, Pablo Lopez Luz photographs the big picture- vast landscapes shot from a distance, with cities, towns, freeways, and people in perspective. Clearly marking that separation between "man and his surrounding space," the "central core" of Lopez Luz's work, Lopez Luz shoots from a distance, yet these are shot still close enough that we can make out the individual people and/or the details of individual lives that continually bring us back to that question of scale. For me, it's not so much the scale of the picture itself, but that of life: how grand is one person's life next to another; next to nature?

© Pablo Lopez Luz, Prolongacion Diagonal I, Estado de Mexico, 2006

© Pablo Lopez Luz, Vista Aerea de la Ciudad de Mexico XII, 2006

From Lopez Luz's statement: "The landscape has played a titanic role historically and keeps on doing so in contemporary times. Man has always had the necessity to portray his surrounding space, be it in a purely natural, contemplative gaze, or as a narrative or document for something else. On the other hand, man has always had to adapt to this same space to live within it. Therefore, any image, carries a specific weight within itself. Any image will “mean” to a specific audience differently to a different one, in social, historical or political terms. The most difficult thing, I believe, is to strip the landscape from these meanings, and this is what I intend to accomplish with my work."

© Pablo Lopez Luz, Vista Aerea de la Ciudad de Mexico, VI, 2006