Museo de la Ciudad de México Exhibits Armando Salas Portugal Photographic Archive

The Museo de la Ciudad de México is presenting "Miradas de nuestro acervo Armando Salas Portugal," an exhibition drawn from the institution's own holdings. The show revisits a series of photographs that Salas Portugal (1916-1995) presented and subsequently donated in 1983 under the title "El arte barroco de la Ciudad de México." Through architectural details — ornament, shadow, light, volume, tectonics and perspective — the photographer built a visual memory of the city, tracing the relationship between inhabitant and architectural and urban environment. Curated by Aysleth Corona, the exhibition rereads a Mexico that no longer exists, one that grew and adapted to the utilitarian and occupational needs of its residents. Salas Portugal's cultivated, compositional eye moves from the novohispano to the modern, opening from the balcony of Chapultepec Castle and closing with a spectacular image of the Museo de Antropología e Historia, in which human scale shrinks to a particle before the museum's magnificence. Internationally recognized, his work belongs to the collective imaginary, and within modern architecture he made visible the work of figures including Félix Candela, Luis Barragán — with whom he began documenting the Pedregal de San Ángel project, the lunar landscape produced by the eruption of the Xitle volcano — Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and sculptor Mathias Goeritz. The photograph itself, the text argues, becomes another work, more than the architecture it documents.