23 november 2007
19 january 2008

This new project by English photographer Adrian Tyler consists of a dozen photos, with striking, visual impact.  Tyler addresses the commitment to ecological values and critiques the colonization of the human race that he has portrayed in his previous projects.  This is visible in the series Construction Work (Space Opera) that we presented in the gallery in 2004, as well as in the series Building, House ó Cimientos.

This new work, still in progress, was initiated in 2001 in the Spanish Meseta, a flat landscape where Tyler finds the ideal framework for capturing images of newly constructed highways and railways.  These symbolize the destruction of the landscape and its own denaturing.  Without straying from the critical view of human impact, the work discusses the collateral damages of urbanization and urban sprawl.  The photos are set in a context of dwindling oil reserves and increasing road construction, at a time when the consumption of fossil fuels is exacting an ever-heavier toll on our planet’s ecosystems.

The series of photographs refers not to the machinations and interests behind the proliferation of the motorized vehicle, or to the increasingly overloaded urban centers. It concentrates instead on the rural settings where the widening of existing roads or the construction of entirely new ones may be seen in a more blatantly destructive aspect.

The increasing pace of road construction ignores natural routes and damages landscapes irreparably. The soil, colored by minerals which determine the variety of living things there while it remains undisturbed, loses much of its fertility by being exposed, and is then buried under the sterile asphalt. Aside from the raptors that feed on the victims of fast moving traffic, and the vegetation that struggles in the polluted air, there is scant life next to a new road.