JOHN LONDONO

Echoes of the Disposable

At Kurt-Kurt Projektraum, as part of the European Month of Photography in Berlin.
March 6- 23, 2025

Photography is a modern kind of sorcery, allowing us, with a click or a tap, to preserve our present moment and those that make it meaningful to us. In Echoes of the Disposable, John Londoño reminds us that this power is perhaps more witchcraft than sorcery; if photography is a kind of magic, it’s definitively coloured black. For even as it offers us a connection to people and places no longer within our grasp, it is only ever a stand-in for them, a mere token, powerful though it may be: fragile, material and ephemeral. What it presents to us is absent.

Londoño’s work is haunted by this absence. Full of specters, it transforms photography into an act of mourning. Above all, of people. Their silhouettes appear frequently in Echoes of the Disposable, their flesh omitted in whole or in part, fading into the blackness of the background. The effect is most striking in the two large PVC portraits appearing in the show, in which bodies disappear into a kind of vinyl void, the materiality of the photo itself.

Silhouettes, and the photo as a token of those we have lost. These tropes have been present in Londoño’s creative work since its early beginnings. Shadows abound in his 2000 photo series, Altares, the Spanish word for memorials to the dead placed by the roadside. Londoño shot the series in Colombia and Venezuela, travelling from his father’s homeland to where his father died in a motorcycle accident. Like the analogue photos that comprise Altares itself, the shadows in the series offer us a trace of a person, an index formed by light - if unlike the photo, only in the negative.

But a trace is more than nothing, and Londoño’s work quietly asserts photography’s power to connect us to others, however fragile and ambiguous. Portraits appear throughout Echoes of the Disposable, such as the photo of musician Zumi Rosow in the exhibition’s more intimate middle room. They have also been central to Londoño’s professional work with musicians, and this photo, somewhat of an outlier in the series, can perhaps be seen as a nod to that work. Yet the photo’s caption, suggesting the transience of language and the durability of absence, places it smoothly within the aesthetic of Echoes of the Disposable, an aesthetic that perhaps itself owes much to alternative music and album art, a kind of photographic dark wave.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, photography reveals its power to forge another kind of connection between people - an artistic one. In the same room, alongside the portrait of Rosow, two images stand apart - not Londoño’s own, but those of his influences. They are the work of his mentor, Serge Clément, and the Venezuelan photographer Ricardo Jiménez, recently deceased. Through aesthetic juxtaposition, figures from Londoño’s past are set in dialogue with his present.

Echoes of the Disposable is not only about people but places, and perhaps more specifically, the feeling of being displaced. Much of the series was shot before and after Londoño’s move from Montreal to Berlin, and the exhibition is structured to guide us through this experience of transition. Before we even enter the exhibition space, an image of tranquility appears visible to us from the streetside, of light shimmering over a rippling lake as a city glows warmly in the background. Walking through the front door, we are greeted by a woman emerging from a lake, her form dissolving into the water’s surface. Liquid, alive, almost in motion, such images invite us in. Taken before Londoño’s move to Berlin - a day on the lake with friends in rural Quebec, a retreat to Lake Atitlán in Guatemala - they are emblematic of the world left behind, a world of fluid and dynamic social connections.

Yet, as we move further into the exhibition, we begin to encounter another kind of environment, no longer natural but constructed, not inviting us in but keeping us out. Many of these photos were shot in 2021 and 2022, when Londoño first arrived in Berlin in the midst of the pandemic. As with the portraits in the series, these places frequently appear withheld from us, beyond our grasp and recognition. In these images, our eyes encounter a boundary - plastic, broken glass - perhaps symbolic of a new environment, alienating and modern, to which we do not yet belong. The effect is strongest at the far end of the space, where we expect an exit but are instead confronted with the image of a door. Barred, under construction and printed on PVC - here we encounter more than just a locked door, but a negation of the door itself.

People, places - Echoes of the Disposable is ultimately haunted by analogue photography itself, a format ‘lost’ to the digital age. Analogue, too, appears in the negative in the exhibition, presented in its absence. With the exception of the two images by Clément and Jiménez, Echoes of the Disposable was shot entirely in digital. Yet the images were made to look analogue through careful editing and printing techniques, such as the use of baryta paper, which replicates traditional analogue darkroom printing and the addition of grain in post-production. The conscious choice not to shoot in analogue, but instead render digital images in an analogue fashion, is decisive. It transforms the show from a nostalgic revival of the format with which Londoño began his career to a requiem for it, a call to something no longer there, lamenting its widespread absence. 

Solitude and melancholy run through Echoes of the Disposable, with its evocation of a lost past and a future not yet attained. In its depiction of absence, the series emphasizes the fragile nature of photography’s power to connect us. Transient, disposable, a mere substitute for the presence of others - Londoño’s work nonetheless boldly displays this fragile power, a power that, like memory itself, is perhaps all we can carry forward.

Matteo Calla
Berlin From the Gallery to the Street
@matteocalla_