About time: sensing the crisis in Nophoto's El último verano

Abstract

Nophoto's collective photography and video project El último verano provides a fragmented, often contradictory document to the deteriorating conditions of everyday life in times of crisis. In it, nine photographers turn their lenses toward portraits of downward mobility, precarity and the growing phenomenon of emigration, as well as summer pleasures and moments of escape. Drawing from Lauren Berlant's writings on the impasse, I read how la crisis is sensed first in these photos in the subject's affective attachments to perceptible losses and then in strategies for survival developed amid an ongoing crisis. Taking stock of the present at an impasse, I argue, is immersed in a strong sense of temporality in which change and loss destabilize the present, evoking senses of return, nostalgia, future projection, escapist fantasy, anxieties about projected risk and so on. And in the photographs, the composite character of Nophoto's project indexes for viewers other ways of looking in times of crisis, in plural ways, that assemble a collective, shared circumstance of everyday life in times of austerity.