JM Ramírez-Suassi, Malparaíso

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by Setanta Books (here). Clothbound hardcover, 300×240 mm, 160 pages, with 81 black-and-white and color reproductions. Includes a title list and a quote by Sergio Larrain. (Cover and spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: JM Ramírez-Suassi’s photobook Malparaíso begins with a simple visual invitation. An image of a rolled up tarp entrance offers us an opening, partially blocked but still passable. It seems to encourage us to peek behind the hanging curtain, without knowing exactly what we might find there.

The title page comes next, and as a title for a body of work, Malparaíso seems altogether self-contradictory – a “bad paradise” certainly feels conflicted, but maybe it’s an appropriate oxymoron for the challenges Ramírez-Suassi sees in the contemporary world around him. The photobook is then subtitled The Wanderer & The Southern Star, providing a clue or two to the literal and metaphorical journey that the Spanish photographer intends to take. Later on, it will become clearer that Ramírez-Suassi has been traveling (from 2015 to 2022) in Mexico and Chile, but at the beginning of this imaginary tale, those specific destinations remain largely undefined.

As with his excellent 202o photobook Fordlândia 9 (reviewed here), Ramírez-Suassi’s approach to visual storytelling in Malparaíso isn’t particularly linear – it drifts from one carefully edited sequence to the next, creating photographic echoes and conceptual layers that build, double back, and ultimately reinforce recurring themes. His perspective is sinuously atmospheric, encouraging us (as his fellow travelers) to form a progressive and propulsive open-ended flow between otherwise isolated fragments and observations. If there is a on-the-road narrative to be followed here, it is diffuse; instead, its moments aggregate into a simmering visual stew, with each new picture or set of pictures adding subtle flavors to the complex mix already in the pot.

As if guided by the stars above, our armchair journey begins with a sparkly view of the dark cosmos, followed by images of snow-covered mountains and valleys, a sleigh ride across a white snowy expanse, and a dirt path up a mountainside, like evocative moments in a rugged cross country trek. Later in the photobook, more travel and landscape motifs surface here and there, including images of turning roads, a flaking mural of a mountain town, a faded forest landscape tacked to makeshift shack wall, and various trains and winding train tracks, as seen through windows and down the lines. Even if the to and from origins and destinations of this mysterious voyage remain unmarked, it’s clear that the artist is using the process of traveling through the land, and slowly moving from the country to the city, as a way of parsing its potential meaning.

One repeated motif to be found in Malparaíso is the idea of things being obscured, covered, blocked, or otherwise less than clearly visible; in many cases, decay has set in, and paradise just isn’t as crisp and clear as we might have expected. A man peeks in through a fogged car window; a stuffed bird sits under some plastic sheeting; and another blurred man pokes at us with a long stick, all three images veiled in one way or another. Later, Ramírez-Suassi employs a different version of this idea in an image of a house seemingly buried to its roofline in rocky dirt, a shadowed view out a window to a dry (and perhaps actually dead) palm tree flanked by an empty crib, and a precarious set of dangling rail tracks interrupted by a huge block of stone. These two runs of pictures have unnerving and dispiriting moods, but ultimately this is balanced by some actual examples of hopeful color and light: a splash of pink bougainvillea trailing over a wall near some grimly grey tracks; a trio of spots of white light on a man’s arm; a falling cascade of sparkling water droplets; a gathering of tiny stars caught in a spiderweb; and the dappled light found coming through the cracks in a darkened wooden building. In these sequences, Ramírez-Suassi seems to be implying that the world might indeed be falling apart around us, but even as it does, there are still a few moments of quiet transcendence to be discovered.

As the pages turn, the persistently downward fall of the “bad paradise” takes shape in all kinds of small surreal finds and strange observations, as though the normal rhythms of life have been upended more than just a bit. If the man with the snake skin around his neck, the disembodied bird feet perched on the pear, and the eyes on the watermelon didn’t signal that something isn’t at all right in paradise, the lizard playing the piano in the dollhouse has to be the one image that completes the argument. Sure, a puzzling totem of stacked logs, a shovel with a burning candle as its handle, a black cat sitting in a box office window, and half a car set into a wall might provide some evidence of a world pushed off kilter, but the lizard image (titled “Human Requiem”) cements the feeling that the natural order has been altogether turned upside down, almost in a fairy tale manner.

Ramírez-Suassi soon moves closer to the city (or many cities aggregated as one), tracking inward from wide vistas of built valleys, to blocks of housing, and further in to houses stacked on top of each other in an overlapped mass. He then draws a visual parallel with jumbled piles of discarded voting boxes, and dives deeper into more violent symbols: a silhouetted figure shot full of bullet holes in an abandoned house, a mural of a police officer choking a woman, various toy guns made of bent wire, and a wall covered in hand prints and initials, like the last marks of humanity. Several images hone in on repeated patterns in the built environment, like triangles (in roof lines and shadows), stair steps (in fences, overpasses, and concrete foundations), and tangled electrical wires. In one resonant picture, an improvised arrangement of broken and discarded letters near a dry fountain spells out NADA (“nothing”), seeming to encapsulate the broader despairing mood to be found in Malparaíso in just one negation.

When people enter Ramírez-Suassi’s frame, which honestly isn’t that often, most of the interactions are indirect or oblique, with people looking without really interacting directly with us as viewers. Many of the individuals who inhabit this not paradise seem troubled, touched, homeless, or otherwise distracted; a few curl up and sleep with gentle trusting calm, but the older woman with something in her eye seems more emblematic of these souls, who are trying to make the best of a grim world around them. Two smart pictures step back a number of paces and capture a boy standing in a vacant expanse watching some vultures perch on electrical poles, and another young man napping with his hat over his eyes while lying in the dirt near a belching factory. Both photographs place a vulnerable figure within the context of the encroaching world, the inherent menace of the place always within view. Even the stray dogs in Malparaíso seem alert and wary, watching closely as the invisible man with camera looks at them as they linger near empty overlooks and vacant shoeshine stands; one other canine wasn’t so lucky, ending up stuffed and encased in glass box, forever ears up alert to dangers nearby.

Malparaíso ends on a understatedly bleak note, with a shopping cart full of someone’s belongings left on a naked strip of beach, flanked by two massive tankers out on the horizon. It’s a clever composition balancing lights and darks, with the two ships placed like bookends, but its message feels so very deflating, if this is what paradise eventually becomes. When we then tie this final visual note back to the rest of body of work, the lingering melancholy mood settles in more deeply. In many ways, Malparaíso is one of the least optimistic books about the 21st century experience that I have come across, and yet its component images are nearly always gracefully crafted, creating an unsettled sense of dissonance between that beauty and rage. It is that insistent friction that gives Ramírez-Suassi’s photobook its enduring bite, offering us a vision of paradise not only lost but actively destroyed.

Collector’s POV: JM Ramírez-Suassi does not appear to have consistent gallery representation at this time. As a result, interested collectors should likely connect directly with the artist via his website (linked in the sidebar).

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Read more about: JM Ramírez-Suassi, Setanta Books

2 comments

  1. Suassi /

    Thank you very much Loring for this review of Malparaiso, one of the most accurate I have read.

  2. Hans Hickerson /

    I nominate this line for a 2025 Academy of Photobook Review Arts writing award: “If there is an on-the-road narrative to be followed here, it is diffuse; instead, its moments aggregate into a simmering visual stew, with each new picture or set of pictures adding subtle flavors to the complex mix already in the pot.”
    😉

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