Martin Roemers: Metropolis

According to calculations by the UN, by 2050 around seventy percent of the global population will be living in cities. For his spectacular series Metropolis, Martin Roemers sets his sights on megacities worldwide with more than ten million inhabitants in which people often live under difficult circumstances in densely populated areas. Roemers lets us immerse ourselves in these extreme, urban lifeworlds: in his atmospheric photographs consisting of agglomerations and taken with long exposure times, traffic and people merge to become blurred, swirling currents. Motionless individuals or street merchants come across as unearthed islands around which surge colorful crowds. Roemers presents these breathtaking urbanscapes from a slightly elevated perspective, and in doing so calls our attention to the stress that this lifestyle involves as well as the admirable resilience of the countless people who lead this life day in and day out.