Jorge Uzon was born in Chile, 1969. He studied photography at the Escuela de Altos Estudios de la Comunicacion in Santiago, and worked as a photographer at the Revista Hoy until 1994, when he left to work as a freelancer in Mexico and Central America. In 1996, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) hired him as its photographic correspondent for Guatemala, a post he held for five years, covering the end of the armed conflict and the peace process there. His work from that period was shown at the Visa Pour L’Image Festival in Perpignan, France. In 2001, he was transferred to the AFP office in Mexico City, but left this job in 2004 to live in Toronto, Canada and pursue independent documentary photography. To date, he has worked on two major projects: one in Bolivia, on the social changes taking place since Evo Morales became president; and one in Patagonia, on the struggle over a plan to build five dams on two rivers in that remote part of the planet, for which he has twice received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council.
Mexico City/Toronto
Photo Exhibit
Key Collaborators:
Jorge Uzon (Photographer/Photojournalist)
Gregory Smith (Acting Academic Director 2009-2010, CURL)
Mars Horodyski (Artistic Director 2009-2010, CURL)
This photo exhibit was presented during the official CURL launch on December 26th, 2009 and will remain on display until the end of January. Jorge Uzon is CURL’s first Artist-In-Residence and his work was also posted online.
The “Mexico City/Toronto” exhibit was a portrayal of Uzon’s experience of Mexico City in 2003 and Toronto in 2005. The photos convey similarities in theme and tone, yet actually have very little in common. In order to draw a further comparison of these two distinctly different places, the acting Academic Director of CURL also created a supplementary Comparative Fact Chart that was displayed alongside the exhibit.
Due to the spontaneous nature of the photographs Uzon captures the impression of each city, documents the passage of time and manages to retain life in each picture that he captures.
“Both cities have changed: where before there was a construction project, an empty plot, the advertisement for a new building, now the promised mound of concrete has been poured. And that is what photography is: history. In this case, a history of particular private and public places.”
