Photos of the Week: Shadow Life

This week’s photos were taken in São Paulo by Hudson Rodrigues.

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Visualizing Globalization 2.0

Imagine this: you’re walking down a side street in Midtown Manhattan and turn onto Fifth Avenue, facing uptown. But there, instead of the void of sky that usually greets the vista north toward Central Park, a massive mountain blocks the view, crowned with an uncharacteristic religious symbol. Then it strikes you: you’ve seen this rocky mass before. It looks every bit like Rio de Janeiro’s Corcorvado peak, topped with its famous statue of Christ the Redeemer. And that’s because it is Rio’s Corcorvado mountain — moved right into the heart of New York.

Welcome to the world of Ciro Miguel. The São Paulo architect spends his spare time dreaming up landscapes in which familiar urban landmarks from around the world collide. The images he’s kitbashed together are his own; most involve elements from his home country, Brazil, or New York, where he was a graduate student. Others encompass his world travels. It’s in the way Miguel’s collages represent the places and ways many travel now, in fact — reflecting trends in trade and politics driven by globalization — that they can be seen as more than mere dreamscapes, representing connections and evoking experiences that have become very real.

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September 11th Street

Between Avenidas Juramento and Olazábal, Calle 11 de Setiembre — September 11th Street — is one of the most beautiful in the upscale Buenos Aires barrio of Belgrano. Its trees arch over the rooflines of multistory apartment buildings, meeting above the middle of the street to form a cavernous, emerald archway that resembles the nave of a cathedral. No wonder visitors to Buenos Aires’ tiny Chinatown, along the congested stretch of Calle Arribeños one block north, often choose to float back to the Subte station on Avenida Cabildo via this pretty street with an improbably weighty name.

The stuff of rote history lessons — caudillos, dates, and battles — makes up many Buenos Aires toponyms, but in this corner of Argentina’s capital, they seem especially heavy with historical references. The next streets south are named 3 de Febrero (the date of a victory in battle over Spanish forces during the Argentine War of Independence) and Calle O’Higgins (for Bernardo O’Higgins, liberator and national hero of Chile). Nearby Calle Cuba, a once surely neutral name, now invites little but political and historical associations. Intersecting each is Calle Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But September 11th Street stands out among them as the most pregnant with meaning. In Latin America, as critics of US foreign policy pointed out in the years after September 11, 2001, the date held sinister connotations long before the attacks: on that day in 1973, a CIA-sponsored coup toppled the elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, ushering in Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. That’s not been forgotten in neighboring Argentina, even if Buenos Aires has its own reasons to recall September 11th — a date of significance more than once in the city’s past.

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Looking for Life in Puerto Madero

The walk from the Plaza de Mayo, the political heart of Buenos Aires, to Puerto Madero, its redeveloped waterfront, begins inauspiciously. Cars barrel down multilane boulevards devoid of people; a weed-strewn lot slated to become a monument to the country’s deeply-loved former president, Juan Perón, lies unconvincingly fallow.

Then there are the railroad tracks severing most of the city from the streets near the sea: Puerto Madero’s redevelopment was accompanied by the construction of a new light rail line, helping turn this frustrating barrier into a vital transit link. But here, in the hostile borderland between B.A.’s bustling Microcentro and the waterfront, the ominous sight of Puerto Madero Station inspires little confidence, its relatively new platform facing tracks overgrown by weeds.

The unused station was not meant to serve the light rail line, which blasts past it, but a half-built commuter rail restoration that had never entirely got off the ground. The sight of the overgrown tracks, encapsulating the miserable fate of much of Argentina’s older, conventional rail network — a once sterling, nationwide system now reduced to a few rump lines around the capital — illustrates exactly the sort of broader decline in national prestige that Puerto Madero’s rise was meant to help reverse. However ambitious those intentions, though, they hardly make it less disconcerting that Puerto Madero Station, spotless in its desertion, serves as an appropriate introduction to Buenos Aires’ newly built-up waterfront itself.

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Photos of the Week: Three Streets

San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.
Photo by Christopher Canning

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Mega(city)transect

In 1999, American biologist J. Michael Fay set out on a project to map and survey the vegetation of Africa’s entire Congo River basin. Heavily promoted by National Geographic as “The Megatransect,” Fay’s feat involved 455 days of walking across 3,200 miles of largely untamed territory. Biologists had actually been using the term “transect” to describe such surveys since the late 19th century, but Fay’s epic-scale journey brought it widespread public recognition. In 2004 and 2005, he and Geographic extended the brand by conducting a “Megaflyover” of Africa, taking photos every 20 seconds during a 60,000 mile plus journey in a small bush plane.

Legendary as the natural surveys of explorer-biologists like Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt are, expeditions like theirs — and Fay’s — are increasingly rare now that most of “the field” has been crossed and recrossed. Geographers have turned their attention toward changes, rather than gaps, in maps of the earth’s surface — particularly those with less than natural causes. So it’s unsurprising that they have become fixated on the sites of the most intense human population growth and activity — cities. By 2008, urban centers contained, for the first time, over half the world’s people.

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Print Isn’t Dead in Peru

Few of the last ten years have passed without claims that yet another innovation — the rise of blogging, then microblogging, social networking, then the spread of smartphones, and, most recently, tablets — had the potential to reshape the way media is produced and consumed. The journalism world has been appropriately shaken and stirred: in the US, falling print revenues precipitated a “great magazine die-off“. Taken aback by the rate of change, “legacy” publishers continue scratching their heads in search of future profit models, while academics ponder whether anything resembling the traditional print publication can persist in the brave new world of incessantly streaming, instantly updated, massively mobilized media.

Sifting through this sea of speculation, it’s easy to forget how much of the planet has been left behind by the conversation — and the expensive technology by which it’s made possible. While it’s true that the explosive growth of some communications technologies has been so comprehensive as to reach even war-torn corners of the world (Mogadishu, of all places, boasts a startlingly sophisticated cell network), indicators of widespread internet connectivity — nevermind social networking — are much less evident. A map showing the connections forged by Facebook, for example, renders poorer parts of Africa and Asia as dark as empty oceans. While other social networks dominate some parts of the two continents, many areas are actually still terra incognita for the “world wide” web.

The existence of a “digital divide” has not gone unnoticed in the past. Still, many commentators have barely stopped to think about the impact of new technologies on far-flung regions before applying generalizing, “world is flat” thinking, not only assuming such tools’ widespread use, but crediting them for coincidental social movements, from the 2009 protests in Iran to the uprisings currently sweeping the Arab world. (It’s worth noting that only about 20,000 Iranians had Twitter accounts in 2009, and only 21% of Egyptians have internet access today. Numbers in Libya and Yemen are even lower. Even if some of the protests behind the recent revolutions were initially organized online, they were only won once offline populations had been urged — by other means — onto the streets.)

Unsurprisingly, the ocean of exuberant hype about new frontiers in tech leaves little room for discussion about the way media is experienced in the many niches where print still does reign supreme. It’s a disappointing trend, since it not only means that we often misperceive the ways such places receive and process information, but also the extent to which new media growth over the last decade has (or hasn’t) actually changed the now-wired world.

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Signs of Peace

A Contemplative Evening in Villa Freud

Of the two habits in which Argentines surely lead the world — psychotherapy and plastic surgery — it seems peculiar that the first, rather than the second, would boast a dedicated neighborhood in Buenos Aires. After all, the point of cosmetic surgery is to be seen, whereas therapy is a much more private affair. Maybe the answer lies in the sheer prevalence of Argentines in treatment — the country boasts the highest number of psychiatrists per capita on earth, and when documentary filmmakers surveyed Porteños (citizens of Buenos Aires) on their psychoanalytic habits, most were not ashamed to admit they’d spent time on a shrink’s couch.

Or it could just be a matter of convenient real estate. Villa Freud, BA’s psychoanalytic district, began to coalesce in the 70s, when social anxiety — perhaps related to the country’s ongoing military dictatorship, or ever-present economic woes — spiked. Doctors eagerly sought out cheap space near the Recoleta homes of their wealthy clients, and found it mostly around Palermo’s ovular Plaza Güemes. It didn’t hurt that the area looked appropriately Viennese, with the twin gothic spires of Our Lady of Guadeloupe dominating the cafe-ringed square.

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Street Signs and Street Art

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This is Argentina Crying

“Everything you foreigners know about Argentina,” the older gentleman asserted, “you know from that Madonna movie.” We’re standing in Palermo Viejo, a trendy neighborhood miles away from the buildings and blocks that pencil in postcard Buenos Aires. If his statement — referencing Evita, the 1996 musical melodrama about Argentina’s most charismatic first lady — were true, outsiders would be thrown by what they found here. There’s little of the country’s trademark tango of mournful melancholy and testy protest politics present among Palermo’s buzzing bars and chic shops. This is not an Argentina that Evita would have ever had to ask to stop crying.

But Palermo is an asterisk on Buenos Aires’ cultural and political map. Elsewhere, BA is a city of brooding memory: the names of generals and battles overwhelm its street signs and the friezes of its major edifices. There’s even a “Parque de la Memoria” in the city’s far north, devoted to the victims of Argentina’s dictatorial Dirty War.

Natives to such history-saturated soil eagerly invoked Evita and her husband, Juan Peron, when the Kirchners (Nestor and Cristina), came to power in 2003 — each eventually taking a turn as president. The parallels went well beyond their power couple personas. Nestor’s gutsy decision to stand up to the IMF on Argentina’s unbearable debt burden earned him acclaim for rescuing the country’s finances. Along with later accusations the Kirchners were attempting to consolidate domestic power, the move helped breed deeper comparisons to their autarkic (and somewhat autocratic) predecessors.

The Kirchners, fittingly, slated a dusty lot just downhill from the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s presidential palace, as the future site of a vast, permanent homage to Juan Peron. But however prevalent, Buenos Aires’ paint-spacked, graffiti-covered monuments are a reminder that Argentine politics offer only illusory glory. Power here has been made and unmade on the street. Raucous demonstrations for, against, or barely related to the controversy of the week are common in the Plaza de Mayo, the vast square reaching out from the front of the Casa Rosada — and tend to radiate well beyond.

That made it natural for many to gravitate to the Plaza on October 27, when word spread of Nestor’s untimely death — and the political shakeup it might portend. The resulting outbreak of national mourning begat a see-and-be-seen atmosphere of patriotic celebration, protest action, and all-out street carnival, coming to resemble the country’s passionate soccer matches more than any somber state vigil.

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Seen and Unseen: Street View Meets Brazil

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Google Street View has landed in Brazil, and its timing is probably no accident: it’s a momentous point in the country’s history. Latin America’s sleeping giant seems, at last, to be climbing into its proper place in the global pecking order: it’s an increasingly assertive diplomatic force that’s put the B in the rising “BRIC” countries and wooed the world to become the future site of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. All that means Brazil will be the focus of intense scrutiny over the next decade, no more so than in its cities, whose violent reputation might be the most jarring objection to the narrative that the country’s trajectory is is headed nowhere but up.

Such is the bilious stereotype of Brazil’s urban barrios that even intrepid street photographers often refrain from unsheathing their SLRs even a block or two from the most upscale streets or highly visited tourist attractions. For virtual investigators, armchair travelers and Firefox flaneurs alike, that opens up a lot of virgin territory to explore via Street View. Take one of Brazil’s most celebrated neighborhoods, Rio’s Ipanema. It’s renown worldwide for its beach scene, but also boasts largely blocks of rarely-documented inland avenues.

I’d pointed my browser only a few blocks from the the virtual beach, on a digitized representation of Rua Visc. de Paraja, when I made my first Brazilian Street View discovery: colorfully pink and blue intersections, which look like tropicalized versions of the scramble crossings common to the busiest corners of Tokyo. Coming across these flamingo-hued florescent bursts helped convince me that Street View might be as adept at validating positive stereotypes of a colorful, festive Brazil as it is said to have been in disproving negative ones faced by other societies — like South Africa, where Street View was also unveiled in time for a World Cup — which the media similarly allows to appear locked in a desperate struggle with urban violence and destitution.

But it’s important not to take a too-naive view of Street View, which, like any recording or imaging technology, inevitably somewhat distorts its subject. Street View’s format — static images taken from a slightly elevated perspective in the middle of the street, make it easier to disregard some of the country’s most persistent urban problems. That’s likely true for many of the developing countries increasingly cruised by Google’s cars. Via Street View, it’s simply easier to stroll (or rather, scroll) through what might otherwise be unease-inducing neighborhoods filled with less than friendly sights, sounds, and smells — and the often distinct impression of being unwelcome. For these very same reasons, though, the technology helps virtual visitors ignore or deny evidence of the root issues that lead to such shocking material and social divides.

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Donkey Show

“La Mona” by Armando Muñoz García, Tijuana

An alley off Avenue Revolution, Tijuana

Cinematic Ghosts

GlobalPost’s Nick Miroff brings us this nice audio slideshow of Havana’s old cinemas — gorgeous Art Deco and Streamline Moderne relics that were once, as he reports, living rooms for the entire city. Some have been converted to other uses, but many still show movies, albeit in a kind of quiet decrepitude, with ticket prices frozen at the same rate as decades past.

“In Cuba, the creative destruction of capitalism isn’t there, so the past never really goes away, it just remains in the present, like the city’s old American automobiles. Cuban socialist aspirations have always been haunted by reminders of a more prosperous time.”

Hong Kong is a city where the creativity of capitalism has been given free reign (unlike creativity of other kinds, which have traditionally been looked down upon). Nearly all of the city’s free-standing theatres and cinemas have been destroyed, though the Yaumatei Theatre, a hybrid neoclassical/Art Deco building that is Hong Kong’s only surviving prewar cinema, is now being restored.

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