Livia Corona Benjamin
presented by The Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University: Barbara Bestor (Director of the Julius Shulman Institute) and Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter (Dean of Woodbury School of Architecture and Director of WUHO)
coordinated by Andrea Dietz with Anali Gharakhani
studio support by Benjamin Gabet, Diana Haro, and Paul Kennedy
event photography by Caco Peguero
Woodbury University Hollywood Gallery
June 28 – July 20, 2019
Livia Corona Benjamin is an equal-opportunity architectural photographer, a documentarian of the built lifestyles of diverse peoples, across continents, high and low, unique and popular. Whatever the context, the architecture she captures makes culture real. Her images are mirrors, reflecting back human ideologies, registering them in the land, presenting them as consuming and consumable.
In both the subjects of and methodologies behind her photographs, Corona Benjamin grapples with the forces of craft versus those of the industrial, of the singular versus the totalizing. She uses the flattening effect of the camera to shrink the gap between different modes, and eras, of production. She captures the form of facts and thereby links society’s intentions and means to its architectures.
The 2019 Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award Exhibition pulls two project series from Corona Benjamin’s two-plus decades career that lay out a century’s worth of history in her native Mexico. The photographs of “Graneros del Pueblo” and “Two Million Homes for México” are records of transformation, a chronicle of political pressures as expressed in infrastructure. Yielding geographic and aesthetic evidence of shifts in national agenda and power, these images confront viewers with the material impacts of the collective will.
In “Graneros del Pueblo,” Corona Benjamin inventories Mexico’s multi-lived conical grain silos. An early-1960s initiative funded by the Compañía Nacional de Subsistencias Populares (CONASUPO), the ‘graneros del pueblo’ were provisions for an agrarian network, storage facilities for goods harvested from the country’s ‘ejidos,’ or common lands. Modernist architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez designed the ‘graneros’ template in reference to Zacatecan haciendas from the preceding colonial era. Farmers in over 1,100 regions then interpreted the plans and produced over 4,000 unique constructions. Corona Benjamin continues this lineage of translation in an evolving body of pictographic studies. Drawing from the silos’ bygone contexts and logics, she uses different representation strategies in a critical extension of the CONASUPO effort. Her black-and-white photographs borrow the visual language of silver gelatin prints—the same language in which the pre-Hispanic ruins that inspired the silo design originally were considered; in so doing, she makes the mid-twentieth century artifacts appear as exemplars for a yet-known future initiative. At the same time, she pairs the documentary images with hypothetical plan diagrams that, through their caprice, create uninhabitable arrangements. Together, the diptychs highlight both the contemporary need for and impediments to new societal ambitions and development role models.
Corona Benjamin encountered the ‘graneros del pueblo’ while photographing “Two Million Homes for México.” Today’s silos, either vacant follies or re-appropriated public amenities, betray the rural origins of now-expansive housing tracts. In the early 2000s, President Vicente Fox Quesada initiated Mexico’s ‘era of public housing’ to fulfill a campaign promise. Through a federal agency, the Instituto del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores (INFONAVIT), the country’s federal farmlands were privatized and reconstituted as vast residential developments, at a rate of 2,500 units per day. These sprawling, low-income neighborhoods, plotted in boundless grids without commercial or communal provisions, rapidly redefined life in Mexico. Corona Benjamin questions this new scenography with her camera, searching its uniformity for assertions of personality and opportunities for other.
The exhibition title, Public Works, sets up Corona Benjamin’s audience to read the content of her photographs as common property. Her archive of push-and-pull between one country’s socio-political leanings and its actual building practices reveals a shared project. She asks each of us to find ourselves, one among many, in her images’ repetitive figures and arrays. Each of us is called to partake in the civic realities of the individual multiplied. Corona Benjamin presents the environment as a group act – and positions us, the public, as its workers.
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Select Press
“Meet an Artist Monday: Livia Corona Benjamin,” LA Weekly (Shana Nys Dambrot)
“Livia Corona Benjamin wins 2019 Julius Shulman Photography Excellence Award,” Archinect (Justine Testado)
“Interview: Photographer Livia Corona Benjamin explores architectural traces of rural policy in Mexico,” Pin-Up Magazine (Natalia Torija Nieto)