Jorge Santiago Photography - Pittsburgh Wedding Photographer - PA Wedding Photojournalist
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About
| Jorge Santiago: My career as a photographer began as a teenager. Given a new way of exploring the reality around me, I found that I wanted to transform it, to render it alien. I became enraptured with the work of Lartigue, Brassai, Bresson and Bill Brandt: with the way these photographers re-arranged elements of everyday life in their frames to reinvent reality. I focused on unexpected and surprising angles, juxtapositions, and perspectives, playing with the motifs of Mexican village life: the bucolic innocence, the fiestas and traditions, the myths of ghosts and spirits. I saw cameras as a way to deconstruct reality and to render the common surreal, and I searched for the conceptual and the mythical in the concrete. The work I did throughout the workshop and immediately afterwards was exhibited both throughout Mexico, in Oaxaca, Mexico City, and Veracruz, and internationally, in Spain, Slovakia and the United States. In 2006, however, with a massive popular uprising and ensuing brutal government repression rocking the city of Oaxaca, I found the search for alternative worlds in the everyday suddenly inadequate and superfluous. I wanted to tell the story of what was happening then and there in the city, to photograph as much to understand and to witness as to create. I spent my days in the streets documenting the struggles of protesters and the sweep of government crackdowns. The photographs I took during this time have been included in the book Memorial de Agravios: Oaxaca, Mexico 2006 and exhibited at the 10th Havana Biennial in Havana, Cuba, in Casa Lamm in Mexico City and at the Centro Fotografico Manuel Alvarez Bravo in Oaxaca. With this mentality, I traveled to Beijing, China with my wife for a year. The city was hurtling itself towards modernity at a breakneck pace. I became fascinated with the juxtaposition of the city’s grandiose remaking of itself, its increasing importation of Western customs and proclivities, and the ancient mores and life rhythms of many of its citizens. I wanted to capture the tensions inherent in these changes and to get at the way in which everyday life, very much rooted in ancient traditions and beliefs, continued to unfold in the city even as the country was determined to remake itself for the 2008 Olympics. Individual photographs from my time in China have been published on the cover and in the travel issue of LunaZeta, and the magazines Facdearq and Matador Abroad have published portfolios of my photography from Beijing. At this point in my career I am deepening my experience as a documentary photographer, returning in a certain sense to the early desire to capture the surreal in the everyday, but with a much more profound and nuanced commitment to the implications of these tensions between modern and ancient; between newfangled, constructed and rooted worldviews; between larger societal and geopolitical forces and the daily lives of people both adapting to a changing world and attempting to stay connected to their histories and traditions. |
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