Malparaíso: A Visual Novel Where Beauty and Decay Collide
Welcome to this edition of [book spotlight]. Today, we uncover the layers of 'Malparaíso,' by JM Ramirez-Suassi (published by Setanta Books). We'd love to read your comments below about these insights and ideas behind the artist's work.
Malparaíso rewrites reality with impulse, poetry, and pain.
This is not a book about one place or one story. It’s a journey across deserts, cities, and shadows, where everything real begins to feel imagined and everything imagined feels like it might be real. Photographed in Mexico and Chile but rooted in a personal and emotional space, Malparaíso moves through contradictions: beauty and decay, order and chaos, memory and fiction. It’s not a clear narrative. It’s something you feel, piece by piece.
JM Ramirez-Suassi works with instinct but finishes with reflection.
He accepts randomness and builds meaning slowly, over years, through sequencing and editing. The result is a visual space where chance and thought live together, a kind of unfinished map where you never know what comes next. There are no captions, no explanations, only images that speak through rhythm, contrast and silence.
Most photobooks explain. This one leaves you lost on purpose.
The Book
Malparaíso is a photobook by Spanish photographer JM Ramírez-Suassi, published by Setanta Books. Shot in Mexico and Chile, the work explores the tension between impulse and reflection, fiction and reality, beauty and decay. The title an accidental discovery, formed from a torn poster of Valparaíso suggests a paradise gone wrong. Across more than 100 images, Malparaíso avoids linear storytelling in favor of poetic sequences that invite the viewer to wander through fractured landscapes and ambiguous moments. With no captions or text, the book challenges traditional documentary approaches and builds a symbolic space where randomness and meaning coexist. (Setanta Books)
Overview of the project: What was the original impulse behind Malparaíso, and what kind of emotional or philosophical journey did you hope to take the viewer on through this body of work?
I like your use of the word impulse. Impulse is a force that is usually characterised by a quick reaction, but it doesn't have to be that way. I'm impulsive when I take a photograph, but I'm not impulsive when I'm putting together a photobook or sequencing images. So I combine impulse and reflection. Another characteristic of impulse is that it is random. Chance is an important part of all this, a trigger. But the choice of images is also important, as they bring these random situations back to the place of thought. As a photographer I accept chance and, in that acceptance, I find a form of freedom. And wandering, which is a paradise without coordinates, is for me the key to that freedom. Camus, for example, accepts chance without ambiguity, he accepts it without seeking escape, without the trap of illusions. I think those who have come closest in writing about Malparaíso have been Loring Knoblauch and Brad Feuerhelm. Knoblauch in saying that the visual narrative is not linear, but that "photographic echoes and conceptual layers are created that build, duplicate and ultimately reinforce recurring themes". And Feuerhelm in commenting that what "we are seeing is an inner subjectivity that shares, while not absolute, an inward-looking worldview, but in doing so, does not condition the response to be pretentious or elusive".
For my last book I was looking for a title that would evoke an imaginary place. It was by chance, as so many things happen, that I found in a second-hand bookshop a torn poster of Valparaíso from which the V and the A had been torn off. One night, looking at the poster, I started playing with prefixes and out came Mal-paraíso, Badparadise, an oxymoron that contained all the evocation I wanted for the book. It was as evocative as Macondo, a place imagined by García Márquez where anything could happen. In the book we go from a snowy place to a desert, from the countryside to the city, from enclosed spaces to open spaces, whole or in half, from life to death. I am very interested in these kinds of dualities.
We know that life is not black and white, there are many shades of grey. But fortunately or unfortunately, what moves the world are the extremes. We can see this every day in many areas of our society. And I am rather pessimistic in this respect, I think we are heading towards a fade to black. Perhaps this is why Knoblauch ended his article by saying that "Malparaíso is one of the least optimistic books about the experience of the 21st century that I have encountered, and yet the images that compose it are almost always gracefully crafted, creating an unsettling sense of dissonance between beauty and rage. It is this insistent friction that gives Ramírez-Suassi's photobook its enduring mordancy, offering us a vision of paradise not just lost, but actively destroyed".
A paradise gone wrong: The title Malparaíso evokes a sense of beauty and danger, of utopia tinged with decay. What does this contradiction mean to you, and how did you express it visually?
I think I have answered before. As I said, I am visceral when it comes to photography, but working with the archives is when I reflect on the images. For me, beauty and tragedy, beauty and decay, always go hand in hand. Whatever I do, whatever goal or idea I pursue, it is always approached under these parameters. The landscapes of Malparaíso are artificially harmonious, but beyond that harmony there is a profound chaos. And the characters portrayed have defeat written on their faces. But here we enter the realm of subjectivity. Beauty is perhaps the most difficult term to define, because beauty is an emotion that comes from the recognition of a personal truth. And this is what makes a photograph interesting. Beauty, in its many dimensions, is the catalyst that connects the image-maker and the viewer. But true beauty is always complex and, therefore, it is necessary to search for it. Fortunately there will never be a consensus in art on what beauty is.
From reality to fiction: Although photographed in real places across Mexico and Chile, Malparaíso feels like a fictional world. How do you blur the line between documentary and dream, and what draws you to this in-between space?
I like to mix reality and fiction, both are confused in Malparaíso. But what may appear to be fiction is sometimes not, and vice versa. I was interested in provoking this sensation in the spectator, forcing the gaze to navigate on the surface of the images and then, moving away from that surface, to go towards its imaginary background. Reality does not exist, it is only one side of the coin. There is no filter in the book that says this is real and this is not, it is the gaze - which is fluid and changing in each of us - that must unveil and become intimate with reality and fiction and construct this place called Malparaíso. And as the gaze is something that is always constructing - and not always rationally - it is the gaze that blurs the dream of reality. The strange thing that, nevertheless, you recognise. It doesn't matter the place, just having the ability to surprise us and to realise that, many times, photographing is the result of finding what you are not looking for.
Advice for photographers exploring imagined worlds: What advice would you give to photographers who want to construct an imaginary or symbolic space within real environments, especially without relying on heavy post-production?
I don't like to give advice too much, as I always base it on my experience. And my experience, my personal background, is not the same as that of others. But to answer your question, I usually tell myself a story, I make a mental composition, so to speak. Then I go to the archive I want to work with and, over time, by isolating the images from their true context, relationships and hybridisations begin to appear with respect to the story I have imagined, and this is how the visual space of the book is transformed. But this is not a one-day thing, it takes me a few years to arrive at something I like. When a photograph is taken, the author performs an act that goes beyond what his technique dictates. There is some magic in the process, because, within the image, things, imaginary or real, are transformed. The best thing of all is to immerse oneself in the atmosphere that has been created. This is the best way to relate to the images. And the most important thing: to have good archives. Without them we will hardly be able to build anything.
Non-linear storytelling: The sequencing of the book feels elliptical and poetic rather than narrative-driven. How do you approach sequencing a project like this, and what do you look for when pairing or arranging images?
If we were to arrange all my photographs one after the other, we would see that the narrative is not linear, and it isn't because life isn't linear either. A linear narrative is predictable, either in theme or concept, but what makes a narrative - I like to call it an elliptical, poetic impulse - interesting is that the images are always a possibility, the image that follows will always be an invitation to the imagination. Indeed, therein lies one of photography's links to poetry. The sequences of Malparaíso, rather than a record of places and events, represent reverberations of events, landscapes and people. As Tarkovsky wrote, "an artistic image does not contain a particular meaning, but an entire universe reflected in a drop of water".
Literary sensibilities: Your work often references literature, and Malparaíso feels like a visual novel. How does reading or writing shape your photographic thinking and what can photographers gain from literary influences?
For this question I will give a brief summary of my beginnings. I lived until I was seventeen on a small island in the Mediterranean. At that age I started painting. I wanted to see the world and I went to Paris with some money I had saved. There I painted in a tiny chambre de bonne, with my Pentax beside me to document my work. It was impossible for me to make a living from painting, so I started working in all kinds of jobs, delivering fruit and vegetables to people's homes, walking dogs, painting interiors of houses and offices. It was a bittersweet time, I couldn't make a living from my painting but I had big and small museums at my fingertips. But it was not at the Louvre that I spent most of my time, but at the Maison Musée de Balzac. Balzac's work revealed a whole living space for me. His Human Comedy, one could say, was the germ of my photobooks, I understood that books could all be interrelated and that everything could have a place in them, all the tensions between the human being and his vital space and its consequences. My photography books can be read like someone trying to build a mosaic with different pieces that communicate with each other. For me, references to the masterpieces of universal culture are important because they are the classical legacy that has formed me and made me who I am. It was also in Paris that I met a photographer at an exhibition. I made friends with him. One night, over a beer, he told me he was going as a freelance photographer to the Gulf War. He told me to go with him, that the photographs paid well. So, without thinking too much about it, with the safe conduct that youth gives you, I went with him. But after a month and after seeing all the horrors of war, I went back to Paris. It was then that photography began to combine with my painting. I have always thought that the experience of war was decisive in making me realise the potential of images. But I don't like to talk about it, I would like it to disappear from my memory. After a while I returned to my native island. I worked as a cabinetmaker with my father and painted at the same time. I did some exhibitions with some success. But again I had the desire to leave. I travelled around Europe and finally settled in Madrid. By then I had completely abandoned painting and photography was already part of me. As you can see, linking photography and literature is easy because it's what I've lived and it's what I carry inside me. What can others gain from it? I don't know. For me it's something unconscious, it's in my DNA.
As for writing, especially about photography, I think it's also a way of getting to know myself. Even when I write for others, I do it with myself in mind. Through writing it is possible to understand to what extent the images are also resized. But I always do this after the fact, especially when I'm putting together a photobook. On the other hand, I don't like to accompany my books with texts, I believe that the visual reader should be free to read and not be influenced by them. Sometimes the simplicity that images possess in their relationships, without an apparent link, does not prevent links from being established, and the presence of chance does not have to be a negative or banal quality, but a true creative force. It is a question of finding within the photographic discourse the image as that which always calls out to another, of disarticulating and restructuring the chain of images in terms of a game with very simple parameters of photographic expression.
Advice for concept-led photographers: For photographers who want to build a project around an idea rather than a single location or event, what would you suggest as a starting point or guiding principle?
The writing, the explanation is the only thing that reinforces conceptual photography. Even so, conceptual or not, the images must have what I call their point of inebriation, a kind of narrative tension.
Where next: Does Malparaíso close a chapter in your work, or is it part of a longer continuum? Are there new ideas or territories you feel drawn to explore next?
All my books and projects are part of a continuum. I have a finished book, According to Crusoe, which has been sitting for some years, just waiting for me to change some photographs. I am also working on K's Dreams. And finally, I had planned to work in the United States, but due to current circumstances that project is no longer stimulating. In any case, life will continue to intervene in fiction, the images will merge, as in the final scene of Tarkovsky's film Nostalgia, in which the protagonist's small dacha is seen inside a great Italian cathedral in ruins. This is what life is, a fusion of everything.
To discover more about this intriguing body of work and how you can acquire your own copy, you can find and purchase the book here. (Setanta Books)
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