Cultural Events

"The Hours", New York, 2003

Impressions of New York

Photographs by José Mayorga

José Mayorga, a Guatemalan artist who broke onto the national scene with a work full of poetry and worry in an investigative series of photographs into the human side of the city that never sleeps. This exhibition is the center piece of IGA's September Homage to New York.

"The exhibit is a series of black and white photographs, which came about during four consecutive trips I made to Manhattan between 2002 and 2005. I didn’t know the city prior to 9/11, but the experiences during my stays timidly outline the tension and collective paranoia prevalent in daily city life when states of maximum alert were in effect.The experienced understands and recognizes the relatively recent pain and mourning because of the terrorist attacks, the states of alert, the heavy feelings on the eve of the Iraq invasion, the arrival of spring, and contemplating Christo and Jean Claude’s work 'The Gates' in Central Park. Urban life in its reality."

"Street photography in an asphalt jungle where the store facades alternate between advertisements, neon signs and announcements. The idea was to show the apparently inconsequential details of daily city life as well as New York’s landscape. Going after objects and subjects, anonymous people, unknowns traveling through opened and closed public areas in work and play activities, everything captured on film from an observer’s point of view."

José Manuel Mayorga

IGA Lobby
Ruta 1, 4-05, Zona 4
Through September 30, 2005