WHAT IS REAL

february 07th - march 18th 2009

opening: Friday 6th of February 7-10pm

The Wall Gallery is proud to present “What is Real.”, the first Berlin solo show of photo based artist Joseph Michael Lopez.

Lopez has worked as humanistic reportage photographer since 1999. As a child of a recently emigrated Cuban mother and a Puerto Rican father, Lopez was born in New York City (1973). His work has received a number of prizes and is widely exhibited. Currently Lopez works for the Walrus Magazine and contributes work to the VU Agency.

“I read the world through my picture making process. My mind and passion bleed photography. This is my framework. A kind of survival.“

Lopez' approach to photography is existential. His camera, a Leica MP, is his constant companion and is his personal access to the world, to the people and their stories that constantly surround him in New York, the metropolis where cultural and social varieties clash like nowhere else.

It is a tremendous urgency for him to make pictures and to arrange the singular fragments in a bigger context at a later time. Lopez' photographs show the silent beauty of single moments as well as the omnipresent unfairness in daily life, eventually expanding to form a poetic mirror of life itself.

The boundary between art and documentation is blurring. The world is not being explained, rather revealing itself in a complex sphere existing between the personal view and the social reality surrounding the artist. For this reason, Lopez is to be placed in the line of the great tradition of American documentary photography of Walker Evans.

Pigeons are flying up at a crossing, a couple immersed and almost solidified before or after a kiss, a random group of people waiting together at a red light...

Lopez' pictures reveal small personal moments dissolving from the big city existence. Behind each gaze and gesture hides a story which can only be anticipated. In Lopez' work one can marvel and loose oneself – and later return to oneself again.