Jordibernad

The magpie eye of Jordi Bernardó is unusual in contemporary Spanish photography that has cultivated a photography of constructs whether intellectual or actual. He photographs places and things without changing what is there in front of his camera. To an extent he is a visual omnivore—everything is potential subject matter for Bernardó. Yet he is highly selective and seeks the odd and overlooked that is hidden in a sea of banality. From the architectural wreckage of everyday life—the buildings, the signs, the sculptures—he plucks, like a magpie, little gems of subjects that have somehow caught his eye and reveal something about our world and how he sees it.

Bernardó wanted to be an architect and then a writer before coming to photography “accidentally.” This shows in his fatal attraction both to architecture and signs that provide the cosmology of our lives through the interaction of signs and representation. This can be tracked through his earliest work from newly united Berlin in the nineteen-nineties where his eye for the juxtaposition of the old and the new as well as the living and the abandoned served him well in a set of intriguing, quirky cityscapes.

For the next several years he traveled the world accumulating a series of unique vistas, strange postcards of an unknown but all too familiar sort. His vistas include rooftop pools in Atlanta, Georgia, and a gaudy hotel décor in Nice, France―who put that reproduction of Napoleon on horseback above that ghastly green divan against a bordello-red wall draped with a screaming gold sash? Other images feature go-go girls in Palma de Mallorca―a sort of lower-ranking superhero, Lieutenant America?―and of recumbent clown sculptures from a theme park in Gerona, Spain. There is also his series on towns with strange names—Paris, Texas, of Wim Wenders fame with its Stetson atop the “Eifel Tower,” Loving, Texas, Bagdad, Pennsylvania, Roma, Illinois, and Barcelona, New York. They all share something of the found object, the objet trouvée, and appear before his camera in all their glory and revel in the incongruity of their details. All of the signifiers, the signs, the sculptures, the inherent tension between the name of a place and its visual reality, add up to hilarious visual jokes. With its windswept prairie, shimmering blacktop road, and seemingly abandoned farm houses, Tokyo, Texas, is the least Japanese place imaginable. Likewise, a manicured lawn with a presumably live deer on it, a ripening cornfield, and a perfectly centered tree do not summon to mind visual symbols of Manhattan, New York, but this Manhattan is not in New York but much further west, in Illinois.

Still, the ultimate found object, a shipwreck, serves as the perfect metaphor for his style of photography. In 1994 the derelict ocean liner American Star was being towed to Thailand to serve as a floating hotel when she broke free of her tow and fetched up on Playa de Garcey, a small remote beach on the west coast of Fuerteventura. In the time-honored fashion of islanders everywhere, the local people salvaged everything they could from the ship and picked her clean before she broke in two. The goods from the cabins, the furnishings and paintings―naturally including many of the ship in her glory days when she was known as the SS America―the pianos and fire extinguishers all have been dispersed around the island. There is even a cafeteria in the capital Puerto del Rosario, the Cafeteria el Naufragio, that features the ship’s portholes, paneling, and furniture.

For Bernardó, the incongruity of marine artifacts now serving on land is the perfect subject matter. It is not merely because the photographer has stumbled on this village as the villagers stumbled on the ship washed-up on their shores, but he has been able to pick the details as they picked the ship clean. Like a magpie, and like the villagers, he has plucked the shiniest, most valuable fragments of this unique event and combined them into a powerful photography based on found objects. Nothing is changed. Bernardó was simply there at the right place and the right time just as the villagers were. His images themselves shimmer with the carefully placed treasures—the glowing bronze portholes, the pianos, even a lifeboat and deckchair or two―now existing in totally different contexts. Indeed, the remaining part of the ship, from prow to funnel, becomes its own spectacle and postcard-worthy tourist attraction. Under a cerulean blue sky the ship, equally blue amid a blue sea, gleams almost as she did in that salvaged painting now hung above an equally salvaged brass rail near yet another porthole in somebody’s home. It is history repeating itself, first as tragedy, now as farce.
Bernardó’s magpie eye has found its ultimate treasure: a unique body of images plucked from everyday reality.