The territory surrounding cities, undergoing transformation, encroaching upon the rural world, forcing what is left of nature into reserves that will virtually disappear over time, leaving only the areas that tourism or folklore can preserve for economic profit or for the sake of memory: that is the periphery. A landscape that is different every day, as it is undergoing an alteration from country to city, and losing every trait of its identity in the process. It is something resembling puberty, that short period of life wherein the body ceases to be that of a child, but is still not that of a man or a woman. Similarly, the periphery does not seem to represent a real landscape; that is why it is a bit incomprehensible or slightly strange, for it does not quite fit into any category or definition.

The periphery also entails the loss of memory, the end of history. Its history will never again be recognizable since nothing about it will survive in a future that denies that memory, a future no longer associated with the difference and the particularity but with the amassing of a global, anodyne, expanding construction based on the need for growth but hardly taking into account the creation of a landscape, a location for a previously existing population.

In that abstract construction characteristic of the periphery we find images in which we see an artificially transformed and yet to be defined landscape, one without any moral category or urban structure, yet already lacking any trace of nature, of the countryside, of order or former beauty. Man has appeared but still as destroyer, not yet as builder; the machines are what predominate. Likewise, photographers use their machines to convert this process of rapid and radical change into something permanent, thus rescuing the last gestures of the place, building a fragile memory of the relation of man to those nameless, undefined, unlimited places that shape peripheries.