📸 Studio Visit: Cristobal Ascensio Ramos & Catara Rego

Two photographers who are documenting life and nature, taking very different approaches with equally impactful results.

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Unknown to us, within Simón Sepulveda’s studio, was another studio that belonged to two photographers, two people that we were inadvertently following on our way through the rain. They were Cristobal Ascensio Ramos, a Mexican photographer based in Madrid, and Catara Rego, a Galician photographer also based in Madrid. The two are a fitting couple as their works seem to get at the same ideas — place, the impact of people, our roles as participants — but expressed in very different photographic modes.

For Cristobal, his works captures fairly straightforward scenes — a rocky cliff face, a desert shack — but the subjects of the images are distorted, as if smudged or pixels dragged to corrode or corrupt the image into something more simplistic. For the rocky cliff, a Virgin Mary becomes only her typical rose and sky blue, the signifiers of the heart and the sky, which in the context of Cristobal’s work appears like a geode that has been revealed from the center of a mountain. For the shack, a car parked before it is being removed block by block, to suggest and remind that these tools are perhaps not all that they seem — just like the tools of religion. The series, unsurprisingly, is called Instant Fossils. At the other end of the studio were a few collages as a part of a series called Pepenar, which is a word used in Mexico for gathering things. The series arranges brightly lit objects around each other, having the effect of an I Spy via museum cataloguing. Is this trash? Is this from nature? Do we keep this? Do we somehow dispose of it? That’s the question these works wonder.

In looking up Cristobal’s work, you find that his work as a photographer is very much concerned with questioning what one is viewing from an almost historical perspective. He uses a technique called “data bending” to manipulate and deconstruct images to represent, in his cases, corroded memories. Although we didn’t get to see the work during the visit, the best example of this is his series Las flores mueren dos veces, or flowers die twice. As the statement explains, the series reflects on both images of his youth, his father’s life, and the life of flowers in relationship to his father’s death when he was fifteen — which he learned at thirty was by suicide. “Margarito, a gardener by profession,” Cristobal notes, “wrote a farewell letter in which he wrote about plants and said: ‘Forgive me and communicate with me.’” The project is the result of his revisiting photos from his life, visiting and photographing plants that survived his father, to creating a virtual reality simulation of these plants and their life. While the works are clearly driven by technology (a la, the pixel manipulation), the effect does what all technology should do but rarely does these days: bring us back to our lives, to deepen relationships we have with each other, living and dead.

For Catara, her works are also straightforward scenes: landscapes — but these aren’t exactly what one might believe them to be. Rocky hills that appear ready for hikers and blue lagoons hugging chalky shores. “It looks like a great place to go swimming,” Bobby mentioned as we examined the images, which certainly reminded of a calanque or other idyllic getaway, using the visual vocabulary of a viewer to make assumptions and “cast” this image within their imagination. “It’s really toxic,” Catara replied. As you look closer at the images, bleaching on the stones and bright orange staining appears and you find that these are examples of areas in the world that have been destroyed and deserted in the name of making something at some time for someone. What is a mine once the land has been destroyed and the area abandoned? What is left after an area that has been overfarmed to the point of a land not functioning has been abandoned? They’re pretty, yes, and they look like nature — but they’re spoiled, made rotten by a desire to give nature a job.

The series is called Zona de sacrificio which offers examples of local sacrifice zones, all these big and small Chernobyls that lie in ruin as monuments of what people have done wrong to the planet, likely for a profit that locals never saw the value in. They should be lessons, these images suggest, but instead they are places that have lost their meaning. Training her eye on Spain, to reveal eucalyptus plantations in Meira and oily waters in Mina de Touro, the beauty of destruction is revealed to show that here — like there, like everywhere — is fair game when it comes to being a candidate for destruction. What then does this mean for people? What does this mean for us, who have no power, who are perhaps millimeters away from the teeth of an extractor? If the land is disposable to some then so are we, right? Clearly, we have to think about our surroundings, our resources, our communities in much more profound ways as everything from Space X explosions to petrochemicals in Louisiana suggest the process of sacrifice. “How does it feel to be sacrificed?” she asks us, when we zoom out to think about the whole of the planet.

Such is the role of photography, right? To draw the eye to a site — be it of history or to place — to consider our relationship to them. Whether to investigate and wonder about one’s own history like Cristobal did with Las flores mueren dos veces or to consider your surroundings like Catara’s Zona de sacrificio, this happenstance meeting with two photographers illustrated when we know but seem to constantly forget. Pictures then, like mirrors, are there to remind us, to offer proof of what’s at stake.

Explore more of Cristobal’s work on his website and Instagram and Catara’s work on her website and Instagram.