STORIES IN TRANSIT

 

   © Photos:Josep Echaburu.Text: Gloria Bosh (Art Director of the Vila Casas Foundation).

The coincidence of a discovery that hits you within the vital traffic of the city always surprises, especially now when the most difficult thing is to find images that catch you. It was thus, by chance, on one of these urban walks, when I saw his photographs for the first time. At first, they appeared as a coincidence, by revealing what is visible and I was moved by that way of looking that acts as an ephemeral mirror of our daily transit, a concept that attracts me and I like to explore. His images impacted me because they allowed me to recognize and enter into the relational character of our existential movement.

Later I valued the technique, I realized that if we combine the visual resources with the emotional depth of each set of glances and exchanges, if we imagine this world so close that is outlined in each bus window or in the reflection of some glass that acts as an unfolding towards an interior to be diluted in the generic shadow of the passage of days, we will obtain a metaphor of our life, always in transit, in the same way that the reference to the movement of an instant produces the strangeness of a sharing without complicity, where the lack of communication dissolves itself in the distance.

Visually, the glass of a mobile window open to the city allows framing the effect of a displacement where, in the midst of transparency and reflection, the sharpness of a gesture or an isolated gaze is superimposed, but mobility and crossing do not solve the loneliness, the isolation of the characters... Even when they appear together, the company is distant because the composition draws and cuts out the independent emotions of these lives in transit that travel with their gaze lost and protected by glass. The frame of its windows delimits and establishes at the same time different levels of depth, between the clarity of a face in the foreground and the absorption of the exterior that is lost in the internal planes, two transits that meet in different directions, where the reflection leads us to the shadow and the visual folds that build the times of the images that are between appearance and disappearance, as Berger would say.

Each image by Josep Echaburu becomes a palimpsest of contemporaneity both in treatment and in form, where the scene besides from revealing lives in transit, the fragility of an anonymous and ephemeral crossing is presented to us as a blackboard that draws forms of life in a constant process of construction.