Serie 04 – Onnis Luque

Architecture for gods archive

Since the invention of photography, architecture has relied on it as a fundamental tool for dissemination—but more importantly, as a means to commodify the architectural object. Through photography, architecture has often been presented as a finished product, detached from the social, ecological, political, and economic processes necessary for its creation—a decontextualized and “neutral” object, as if its production could occur independently of any ethical or political stance.

In this sense, the State has historically used architecture as a vehicle to reinforce dominant ideologies and discourses, making it clear that the supposed “neutrality” of architecture is a myth—and therefore, so is the neutrality of architectural photography.

A clear example of this close relationship between architecture and State power is the Heroic Military College, the winning project of a competition held during Luis Echeverría’s presidency in 1971 (the same year as the “Halconazo” and just three years after the Tlatelolco massacre), awarded to Agustín Hernández and Manuel González Rul.

“Roots,” “Pre-Hispanic culture,” “Monumentality,” “Greatness,” “Nation,” “Mestizaje,” “Modernity,” “Past and Future”—these are the concepts associated with the project. They are the very values that the military institution upholds rhetorically as part of the ideological foundation of the modern Mexican State, which, by 1976—the year the building was inaugurated—was in the midst of its consolidation and peak.

But how can photography be used as a medium for critical reflection on architectural production? How can I be self-critical of my own work as an architectural photographer? How can I construct a visual narrative of this project, grounded in the current sociopolitical context? How can I take an ethical-political stance during a moment of increasing militarization in the country and make it visible through photography in an exhibition about a military building? How can I avoid simply picking up the camera and saying, “It was a sunny day”?

This piece challenges the hegemonic narrative of commercial architectural photography by adopting a critical perspective—one that understands architecture as a complex process of social relations shaped by power and domination, recognizing its agency within the historical sociopolitical and economic context in which it exists.

In doing so, I define my aesthetic-political stance through my photographic practice by inverting the black-and-white tones of the images—a visual metaphor for the inversion of the roles that the Mexican military claims to fulfill as a State institution: from serving, protecting, and caring for the population, to becoming a repressive tool of social control, serving the political and economic interests of capital.