Everything Passes

The Calle Junín is one of the best-known thoroughfares in Medellín, Colombia. From the 1950s through the end of the 1970s, street photographers known as fotocineros would photograph passersby on the Calle Junín and offer their images for sale. Everything Passes lovingly compiles these nostalgia-laden documents, which—as the title implies—convey not only the everyday life of bygone eras (along with the clothing, cars, buildings, advertisements, shops and display windows of the time), but also conjure the powerful sense of ephemerality and mortality that inheres in the casualness of both the images and the act of walking. Some 400 anonymous photographs were collected to make this volume, over a four-year period. Charmingly designed with a stamped cloth cover featuring a pedestrian in silhouette, the publication includes a meditation on the history of the Calle Junín that accompanies the photographs throughout.