Series 02 – César Béjar

Documentation Museo Tamayo

On the Possibility of Manipulating Time

“To learn to see old forms with new eyes, rather than looking, as until now, at new forms with old eyes.”
 — Gustav Meyrink

By the time Yasuhiro Ishimoto visited the Katsura Imperial Villa in 1953, his vision as a photographer had already been profoundly shaped by his studies at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where the teachings of the Bauhaus had taken firm root under the influence of figures such as Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. In that 17th-century imperial palace, Ishimoto recognized compositional patterns and geometric abstractions that allowed him to cast a contemporary gaze upon a historic structure—one already hailed as “modern” by figures like Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius. His photographs of the villa, later published in the book Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture, alongside texts by Kenzo Tange and Gropius himself, are a testament to that approach.

A similar observation might be made—though in a different register—about the body of photographs César Béjar has produced of the Rufino Tamayo Museum, the iconic building by Teodoro González de León and Abraham Zabludovsky. Photography, as a medium, is often described in terms of its ability to freeze time—to capture or describe a precise moment. While Ishimoto gravitated toward a compositional grammar rooted in geometry, Béjar seems to seek a suspension of cyclical time. And yet, this suspension doesn’t point to a single instant frozen in place, but rather suggests an ambiguity—a dilation of temporality that broadens the kind of time photography is capable of expressing. As if, rather than halting time, his images attempt to contain it.

The absence of harsh shadows—or their soft attenuation in some of the images—as well as the overall muted color palette, contributes to this feeling of temporal suspension, or at least a stretching of the chosen moment, extending just beyond the edges of the shutter’s click.

Perhaps it is precisely Béjar’s dual training as an architect and photographer that enables him to look at the “old forms” of the Museo Tamayo with “new eyes”—not only formally, but temporally. His images suggest not a nostalgia for the past, nor a fixation on the present, but rather a way of seeing that embraces time as layered, atmospheric, and unresolved.

Alejandro Guerrero.