Alejandro Luperca Morales Documents Ciudad Juarez Through Google Maps Pictures

In 2020, unable to travel due to the restrictions imposed because of Covid-19, Alejandro “Luperca” Morales began exploring the streets of Ciudad Juárez, his hometown, through Google Street View. The Mexican artist documented his visits by generating a file that has more than 500 images. When he returned home sometime later, among his family photographs, he found a photo viewer, a small plastic object that allows you to view slides by holding it up to the light.

Morales’ project is presented as a strange and familiar album of a city traditionally represented with violent images. The photographs taken from the online map are transformed into slides which, once inserted in the viewer, show the daily life of this Mexican city with police, the military and gunmen. The algorithmic intermediation of the online platform and its aesthetics are also visible in the work, blurring everything that its computer vision system identifies as a face. Likewise, the production conditions of Google Street View are also evident in places that seem frozen in time, as Google has not documented the city frequently.

Using a popular vision tool to view images generated by a global mapping platform, Archivo Juárez explores how the forms of production and circulation of images on the internet condition the representation of daily life and the personal imaginary stemming from it.

Words by Jon Uriarte photographs by Alejandro “Luperca” Morales

Alejandro “Luperca” Morales (b. 1990, Ciudad Juárez, México) is a photographer that lives and works in Nuevo Leon. He is interested in the generation of archives as a question of the production and consumption of images, as well as language and memory. His work focuses mainly on violence, territory and porno-misery. Some of his works include the use of Ciudad Juárez newspapers, obsolete forensics web pages, Google Earth, and declassified Border Patrol files. Follow him on Instagram and PhMuseum. 

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This feature is part of Story of the Week, a selection of relevant projects from our community handpicked by the PhMuseum curators.