Due to its location and weather conditions, the capital of Guatemala is generally verdant, and thanks to flowering trees, at times colorful. In the recent exhibition Ideas de progreso (Ideas about progress), however, local photographer Andrés Vargas plunges viewers into gloomy scenes in Guatemala City. Focused by turn on natural elements, architectural details, and disorienting semi-urban scenes, Vargas’s photographs convey a sense of disconcertion about the expansion of the urban project and those infrastructural elements that grow alongside.

Andrés Vargas doesn’t altogether disregard the city’s lushness and tropicality but subjects even natural motifs to the somber palette. Nonetheless, plants are secondary characters in this series; people are altogether absent. Rather, Vargas hones in on markers of so-called progress: large buildings serve as signs of economic progress; tin roofs stand in for the kind of architecture born of precariousness; rocky hillsides appear to await construction. While there is stillness in most of the photographs, some convey at least a sense of potential movement: a hand pouring water into cement, a spontaneous sculpture of ladders upon ladders. A pair of security cameras sprouts from the top from a tall post; they watch over it all.

These cameras are key to understanding this body of work, and particularly the choice of the melancholy hue: Vargas conveys their ubiquity as a marker of insecurity in the city, as well as, paradoxically, the feeling of security their presence is intended to produce. In reality, their existence serves, as in so many other cities, as an ineluctable reminder of the constant monitoring and recording to which citizens worldwide are subject.

The topic of security is an important and pervasive one: as “progress” has arrived in the Central American capital, at times in the guise of gentrification it has come hand in hand with the need for a pervasive apparatus of surveillance. In the text accompanying the exhibition, Gabriel Rodriguez Pellecer describes daily life in Guatemala City as one that occurs in bunkers: “the home is a bunker, the car is a bunker, the office is a bunker.”

With his glum tones, Vargas not only conveys a psychological bleakness but also actual city views through tinted car windows, another security measure. The photographs thus recall the Claude glass, or dark mirror: a portable, dark, and reflective object formerly used by landscape painters to render a scene more translatable. The metaphor of the black mirror finds literal echoes in the screens we all carry around with us, which in their “off” setting reflect darkly back upon us. As if scrutinizing a dark screen, we search in Varga’s photographs for a source of light.

One photograph in the exhibition, of a flat, flakey black plane, suggest that even a bleak, impenetrable surface eventually cracks. In their darkness, the photographs in Ideas de progreso recall the grave lyrics and tone of Leonard Cohen’s music, in particular the line “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

This metaphorical light shines in through the single-color photograph included in the show: a close-up view of an orange on a branch. With its soft saturation and close focus, the growing fruit conveys some hope and resilience, powerfully suggesting that there is light in the city, somewhere, for things to grow. Considering Guatemala’s history, a small country that underwent a harrowing civil war from between the 1960s to 1996, this isn’t an insignificant gesture. And in that light, neither are the attempts of moving forward – of manufacturing “progress” – however fraught these might be.

- Paula Kupfer