Living on the periphery has its own rules. Cities have become an expression of the social tensions that dominate Latin American societies. While they articulate the difficult coexistence of wealth and poverty, they also speak of history and the change in everyday life. Conflict is permanently present in the “public space”; so one of the prerogatives of the privileged has been to privatize space. Closed neighbourhoods, patrolled by security, bloom in the suburbs of the major towns: from Sao Paulo to Mexico, Santiago and Buenos Aires, social seclusion is growing, accompanied by the cyclical crisis of our economies, each of which throws thousands of new families into poverty and invisibility.

Visual artists have been paying growing attention to the social landscape, and to its physical manifestation in the cities in which they live. Esteban Pastorino has an alternative perception of the common space with his images taken from above, by hand made cameras attached to kites. Buenos Aires under his flying lenses is like a maquette of itself, with light distortions and bizarre focus. His subtle technique brings objects a new dimension and scale, transforming them in theatrical setups. In one image he creates a playground of abandoned wagons as if it were a children’s train set, with the city as a background or a dream in which people are absent.

The child that plays is invisible – maybe it is the photographer himself, questioning reality and recreating it. The rules of the game are set, and the kite keeps flying under the photographer’s control, not as a toy, but as a creative and interpretative machine. Invention is a way out of the usual and leads to a materialization of an imagined land.

Of all the cities in Latin America, Sao Paulo is the most urban, dynamic and exclusive (both in its exclusion and its exclusivity). Visual statements about Sao Paulo are as diverse as the origins and expectations of its 18 million inhabitants. Iatã Cannabrava chooses to focus on the outskirts, in the marginal towns and neighbourhoods around the centre in which 80 percent of ‘paulistas’ live. His long essay about the suburbs of Sao Paulo concentrates on the areas in which being marginal is the general status. Electric cables that are built to communicate and exchange create the opposite when they come together: every link generates a short circuit. These ultra-urban settlements are the peripheries of the periphery. In them, most rights are withheld and integration becomes utopia. The centre fears the borders, and there is little trespassing through the lines. Only a few photographers, like Cannabrava, make these unknown territories the subject matter of their work and help to bridge the distance through a vision that is both interaction and exchange.

Milagros de la Torre, a Peruvian photographer living in Mexico, has worked on exclusion from a different perspective. She photographs armoured cars that transport funds to and from the banks to the financial centres of Latin Americas’ more extended megalopolis, Mexico DF.

The metal trucks segregate the wealth, and they say: it is here, but you cannot touch it! A large white passepartout surrounds the image of the truck, and strengthens its separation from the viewer. But the car is also desolate in its solitude, heavy with its cash, inaccessible and blind. It goes through the cities carrying what belongs to them, to the others. The bystanders see it pass, and they can do nothing, just see how much is still left in their pockets.

Back in Buenos Aires, Facundo de Zuviría has recently completed an essay on what happened in Argentina two years ago, when the country went bankrupt, and people were in the streets to claim their money that had been confiscated by the banks. He focused on the old shops of the city, and on their symmetric architecture. The shops, abandoned by clients and shopkeepers, the metal blinds closed, became canvasses for the urban wall-writers. Argentinean Siesta is a minimalist approach to the crisis, and it concentrates on the details. There is a rhythm to the closed shops – the metal curtains are still beautiful, with a hidden passion to be reopened again: maybe tomorrow, maybe next century.

Uncertainty characterizes these pieces of work. Something is moving, but nobody knows in which direction. The social landscape changes in front of the camera and all photographers can do is offer their personal vision: making reality more comprehensible through their subjectivity.