My work described in a essay by Juan Francisco Hernández
ALEX COGHE: DOCUMENTING THE STREETS OF MEXICO CITY
In an essay on photographer Saul Leiter, Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole tells us that, for a long time, photography in color was considered superficial and suspenseful, and that it wasn't until the 1960s that MOMA He became interested in William Eggleston and photographs that worked with color. But a decade earlier, Saul Leiter had already been doing a color street photograph. Except that Leiter had to wait until 2006 for his work to get the recognition it deserved. Today, color is common among street and documentary photographers.
If I had to describe Saul Letier's photography, I would say that Leiter wrote what poems with the camera. The mystical decision of Alex Coghe's photography, only those poems by Coghe are harder, less idealized, hyper-realistic. Perhaps Alex Coghe's work refers me more to that of the street photographer, Joel Meyerowitz, and even more so, to that of the personal journalist, Nan Goldin.
Alex Coghe's photographs do not have a usual composition. From what I can see, he never cuts them in post production. He decides to leave fragments of people, cars, objects and everything around the subject he is photographing inside the painting. The above makes us feel that we are in the middle of an enveloping reality; as if we were located in the exact place where he is taking the photograph. In some images you can see the intention of the photographer to find a symmetry and to take our eyes through lines that lead us to discover the same things that he sees: what seems to be hidden in the city, what happens only for a second and then it is lost forever. He takes us to discover a place, but not as tourists, but as travelers; as silent witnesses to a time and place struggling to survive poverty and marginalization. He shows us a way of life, an atmosphere and the human condition of its inhabitants, which in little or nothing resemble the inhabitants of other parts of the world.
Alex Coghe's street work revolves around different themes: the socio-economic contrasts of the city, the bizarre characters that circulate through the streets and their different trades; folklore, everyday life, the unusual and the bizarre.
The ability, as if carrying an interior radar, that Alex Coghe has to find patterns and colors within the city is striking. People who wear one color and who are next to objects of the same color. Geometric shapes that are repeated between people and objects, in a precise moment and in a precise place, showing us that it is possible, if we have the necessary talent and observation capacity, to find the mysteries that occur all the time around us.
The everyday scenes in Alex Coghe's works are misleading, because they have very little of everyday life. If we look carefully, we will find that at some point in the image something is happening that is out of the ordinary and that life is anything but monotonous, for those who develop the capacity for admiration (like that photograph in which there is a group of people gathered and, below them, the pavement of the sidewalk seems to rise fiercely). Because this is what Alex Coghe has: a latent and furious admiration for the world around him. An interest in living beyond the mundane and transcending through art.
Alex Coghe's work is not a job for just any observer. It requires a greater commitment to the viewer than the work of other photographers.
Photographers like Alex Coghe are there to show us the path of discovery. The importance of living in the present and of giving each thing a meaning and, to our existence, a fuller meaning.
Juan Francisco Hernández
