COLORADO
When I was offered to work in Colorado I didn´t really know what I was going to find, but the Rocky Mountains, Denver and several famous ski resorts. Once I came back home some weeks later, thanks to the generous of the people I met there (especially Romero´s Family), I brought a gift I will keep for ever: to have the chance of knowing their culture from within. The experience was so good I went back the next year.
I always thought I would know that part of the United States in winter, plenty of snow. Paradoxically it was in summer, over 90 Farenheit degrees…as fate would have it.
This pictures come out from my curiosity about the world, from the desire to show the people I love and cannot come with me every time what I see and my experiences.
This is Colorado: plains which smash against the mountains; trees like aspen-with the sound of it leaves- or the blue spruce; steeps mountains and rivers, Denver Broncos, shinny sun and summer storms. But above all, is the land of the Pioneers and the Gold Rush.
A black Ford Focus with leather seats over 100 Farenheit degrees, Calexico on my Ipod and a radio station with 50´s and 60´s songs in the Mid-West for someones, or West for others. A road movie, a western ad lib shot while the miles got into the odometer, where the characters speaks sincerely and feel curiosity about where I came from. Characters who don´t doubt about telling me their childhood memories and stories surprised that someone that come from far away can pay them so much attention.
This is the Colorado I lived, I wish you enjoy it.
Cristina López-Dóriga Juanes. Gijón 2016
In the late 60´s in some points of the United States a new society model arrived at rural areas. A lot of people decided to form families in this places built from zero instead in the big cities. Malls, parkings and tons of houses with backyards very similar to each other appeared in housing estates designed at milimetre, that seen from the air look like science fiction. In this new developing culture, the only transport the car and so the highways became essentials for arriving on time to work in the city.
The new wealthy middle class rural America was masterfully documented by photographers like Robert Adams or Lewis Baltz, their pictures became a part of the history of the media. Colorado is one of the States in which this change was most evident.
But this was not built over wild land. Before the bulldozers came there were bars, towns, trucks… a country life of minor roads closer to traditions.
Most of the pictures in this book show what resisted that modernization. Patterns of time can be seen over the wood of the houses and the sheet metal of the cars, the almost empty roads that keep on connecting to this land inhabitants and the paths which keep on being the backyard for some kids.
It looks like the American Dream found all this people awake.
Nicolás Cancio. Gijón, 2016
Photobook (50 numbered copies) Materia Editorial 2016.
This Project has been shown in September 2016 in Mediadvanced Gallery Gijón; May 2017 in Imàginaria Festival in Castellón (Benicàssim), and in September 2018 in “Cultural Fall” in Quijano (Cantabria).
