Martin Roemers: Metropolis

Martin Roemers photographs the city as weather rather than as skyline. The subject of Metropolis is the megacity — urban regions of more than ten million inhabitants, where dense settlement often comes with difficult conditions — and he enters it through movement. From a slightly raised vantage point he records roads, crossings and squares where traffic and pedestrians merge, under long exposure, into blurred, swirling currents, so that the crowd reads less as a sum of individuals than as a single continuous force.

Inside that movement, a few figures hold still. Street merchants, someone waiting alone, a pedestrian mid-crossing: they become fixed points around which colour and noise sweep past, like islands the current has not carried off. That contrast between stillness and surge is the engine of the series. The long exposure is not there merely to produce an effect; it registers the daily pressure the crowd absorbs and, just as much, the endurance of the people who move through it day after day. What might have been a display of density becomes a study in how ordinary life is sustained inside it.

The photographs were made between 2007 and 2015 in cities including Guangzhou, Lagos and Mumbai. Hatje Cantz published the series in 2016 as an English-language hardcover of 144 pages and 86 photographs, 275 by 347 millimetres, with introductory texts by Ricky Burdett, Azu Nwagbogu and Els Barents. Nadine Barth edited the book; Julia Wagner of grafikanstalt designed it. The jacket carries the same transformation the project is built on: traffic and crowd drawn into streaks.

For a collector, the weight of the book lies in the persistence behind it — an eight-year project, a consistent way of looking, a question returned to again and again: what the city does to the people inside it, and how they live there. A single picture shows the method plainly; gathered at this length, it accumulates. The 86 photographs and the accompanying introductions preserve the series as it stood in print and give a clear basis for following Roemers’ work of this period.

According to calculations by the UN, by 2050 around seventy percent of the global population will be living in cities. For his spectacular series Metropolis, Martin Roemers sets his sights on megacities worldwide with more than ten million inhabitants in which people often live under difficult circumstances in densely populated areas. Roemers lets us immerse ourselves in these extreme, urban lifeworlds: in his atmospheric photographs consisting of agglomerations and taken with long exposure times, traffic and people merge to become blurred, swirling currents. Motionless individuals or street merchants come across as unearthed islands around which surge colorful crowds. Roemers presents these breathtaking urbanscapes from a slightly elevated perspective, and in doing so calls our attention to the stress that this lifestyle involves as well as the admirable resilience of the countless people who lead this life day in and day out.

Exhibitions: 1.2.–26.4.2017, Anastasia Photo, New York; 16.2.–8.3.2017, India Habitat Centre, Neu-Delhi; 21.–25.3.2017, Art Central Hong Kong

Edited by: Nadine Barth
Designed by: Julia Wagner, grafikanstalt
Einleitung von: Ricky Burdett, Azu Nwagbogu, Els Barents
English
January 2016, 144 Pages , 86 Photos
hardcover
275mm x 347mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-4006-7

Publisher page editorial text:
According to calculations by the UN, by 2050 around seventy percent of the global population will be living in cities. For his spectacular series Metropolis, Martin Roemers sets his sights on megacities worldwide with more than ten million inhabitants in

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