Ramón Williams: ‘Last Green Patches’ or Where the City Still Breathes

Since its origins, photography has woven a bond of eternity and permanence with the city. Like silent accomplices, artists of the lens have known how to stop time at the very moment when the streets murmur their everyday stories, when spaces and their people merge into an amalgam of narratives and dreams that ultimately shape our collective memory. In every image where the city reveals itself, the paradox of the ephemeral and the eternal inevitably pulses: the certainty that everything changes, but also the persistence of that which, somehow, always remains.

For Ramón Williams, the city is not merely a setting, but a living organism, a space in perpetual transformation, where the traces of the past intertwine with the present and reconfigure the future. His photographs transgress the idea of the city as a mere architectural framework. Where walls, streets, and lines overlap, a dialogue opens with the systems of thought of contemporary society.

Williams is a photographer of matter. His gaze transforms the city into an almost abstract entity, a form that unfolds and reinvents itself over and over before the viewer’s eyes. Lines, colors, graphics, and textures emerge as new landscapes, revealing the chaos that surrounds us, the incessant pulse of urban life.

In his latest exhibition, Last Green Patches, he abandons tight frames to experiment with wider, aerial shots. From that height, the urban space appears as a changing, fragmented map, where the architectural fabric, irregular and disordered, spreads relentlessly across the territory. The aerial view not only reveals urban dynamism but also the speed with which contemporary developments devour the remaining pockets of nature, slowly erasing green in favor of concrete.

The use of selective color, employed here with precision and awareness, guides the viewer towards the tension between the gray blocks of construction and the few areas of vegetation that still resist. This contrast creates a sensation of suffocation, of discomfort, as if the city were breathing with difficulty. The green then appears as a final bastion, fragile yet insistent, holding its ground amidst the accelerated development of the urban chaos of La Pequeña Habana.

Although the images focus on a specific development, their message transcends the limits of the place: it resonates in many of our cities, where the urgencies and fashions of progress sweep away every natural vestige in their path. Williams captures an instant in which the certainty of constant transformation vibrates. If we were to return to those coordinates in a month, we would discover significant new changes, perhaps with less green or completely converted to a scale of grays.

Even when we recognize the spaces, the chosen angle and the editing work place us in ambiguous terrain, where the urban is perceived as both concrete and abstract. The artist plays with forms, with illusion and memory, transforming the city into a visual network that is also a conceptual one. Williams’s work not only documents the city in its accelerated metamorphosis: it turns it into a metaphor for our own contemporary condition, marked by the constant tension between what disappears and what struggles to remain.

In these photographs, the urban landscape reveals itself as a mirror: it reflects the image of our aspirations, our excesses, and our absences. Before them, we are witnesses and accomplices to an unstoppable transformation, but also guardians of what still persists. The city, made of fragments and scars, rises here as a visual poem that calls on us to ask ourselves what we want to preserve, what we are willing to lose, and what forms of permanence we have yet to imagine.