Montevideo Gray

There is a Montevideo that Montevideans inherited from literature rather than from life. It is the leaden city of Onetti—the one of *El pozo* and *La vida breve*—a capital without sun, with somber walls and low skies, which for decades has seeped into the way its own inhabitants view their streets. Montevideo, they say, is gray.

 

Montevideo gris starts from that assertion to refute it.

 

I arrived in this city from Spain in 2011, and the first thing I saw was precisely what the locals no longer see: color. I saw it in the magenta sky that crowns the Mercado Modelo before dawn, in the electric blues of a construction tarp, in the yellow flags that wave on carnival nights, in the wet asphalt that turns the rain into neon. I saw it in a red door, in a palm frond, in a vintage car, in a sunset over the waterfront promenade. The gaze of the newcomer is still unfiltered: it registers everything that the accustomed eye has learned to discard.

 

That's the place from which I photograph. I'm not looking for a different city than the one that exists: I'm looking for the one that's already there, the one that habit renders invisible. The color of Montevideo isn't my own discovery—it's an obvious fact that demands to be seen anew.

 

Sometimes you have to come from outside to give back to a place what it always had.

 

Documentary project in progress. Montevideo, since 2011.