Iñaki Bergera

Iñaki Bergera follow Spanish, born 1972

Lives in Zaragoza, Spain

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Twentysix [abandoned] Gasoline Stations

Introduction

“Whatever power there is in the pictures is bound to the closeness with which they skirt banality”.

Robert Adams

There are twentysix gas stations like in Ed Ruscha’s project (1963). A tribute? And, why not? The objects themselves attract me. I don’t pursue any documentary task and yet these shoots may also be read as documents of our contemporary context of crisis and abandonment. Rather, I look at them as architectural pieces, as typologies with scale, size, form, structure and a particular relationship with their generic and blurred context. My straight and explicit gaze tries to construct an accurate architectural shoot, meaning being concern about framing, perspective and the overall aesthetic balance of the photograph itself. The sequence of photographs attempts not to be bad or style-less as Ruscha’s were implicitly supposes to be.

The stations are all abandoned. Many of these private owned facilities were discarded in the early 1990s when new and expensive security requirements were implemented. Multi-national corporations like Shell, Mobil or Chevron became the McDonalds of gas distribution pushing the traditional and independent stations to their end. In addition, the new highways and their town bypasses contributed to the endemic isolation of these infrastructures.

To me this is not a mimic or an ironic cultural critique and revision of the Americanness clichés. I don’t even attempt to re-contextualize again the reading of these stations as conceptual items. As an European foreigner, to be able to discover these still standing road ruins in the territory means having had the opportunity to experience and reporting a personal encounter with an iconic and emblematic element of the American automobile culture that, despite of being abandoned, is nevertheless alive and kept timeless, like dissected by the strong Southwest sunlight and dust.

Naively I may turn back into romanticism by finding again a sense of purity and beauty on those objects. The quality of architecture is best shown on its ruins, it’s said. In any case, this project has allowed me to travel in time and think about the caducity of the everyday built environment and the capacity architecture has, at its best, to transform common and generic sites.

Iñaki Bergera. New York, 2012

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Biography

Iñaki Bergera received his Degree in Architecture (1997) and PhD (2002) from ETSAN in Pamplona, Spain, with a dissertation awarded and published by the Fundación Caja de Arquitectos. Funded by the Fundación ‘la Caixa’, he also graduated with distinction from Harvard University in 2002 with a Masters Degree in Architecture (MDesS). He is Associate Professor of Architectural Design at the School of Engineering and Architecture of the University of Zaragoza, having taught formerly at the ETSAN (1997-2007) and at the Universidad Europea in Madrid (2007-09). He has been a visiting teacher and guest critic at the London Architectural Association, Harvard GSD, TEC and CEDIM in Monterrey and the Schools of Architecture of the University of Arizona in Tucson, Bologna-Cesena and Lisbon Technical University.

Devoted to photography since 1995, in 2001 he studied photography at the Harvard School of Visual Arts, with the British photographer Chris Killip, taking as well a course on Architectural Photography with the professional photographer Gerry Kopelow. Ever since then, he has been passionately involved in photography both as practice and as scholarly assignment, understanding architecture and photography as interdisciplinary parallel discourses. Starting with his own practice in collaboration with Iñigo Beguiristain he began to receive professional architectural photography commissions and his series have been published on prestigious professional international media like Casabella, A10, The Architects' Journal, Detail, Arquitectura Viva, Baunetz or ArchDaily. Along with that, his interest in contemporary urban and hybrid landscapes and buildings has lead him to produce an intensive and coherent photo work displayed in several solo exhibitions.

He is currently involved in a rigorous theoretical research on issues related to architectural photography. He is the Main Researcher of the Research Project "Photography and Modern Architecture in Spain 1925-65" sponsored by the 6th National Research Plan I+D+i of the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad running from 2013 to 2015. He has been Visiting Scholar in world celebrated institutions like the CCA in Montreal, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Center of Creative Photography in Arizona or Columbia University and the International Center of Photography in New York, and the results of this research have been presented in international conferences and published in books and journals. He belongs to several international research teams like the EAHN Urban Photography, Film and Video group and, in collaboration with Ricardo Lampreave, he organizes the yearly Symposium “Architecture and Photography” in Zaragoza.

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