It was Henri Bergson who wrote that the eye only sees what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
I think that the eye is only blessed by true beauty when the heart is ready to receive (and honor) whatever comes up, either if it’s beautiful or not.
There’s a powerful analogy between photography and love. The more I love, the better I see, the better I catch up the marvel moment, the brighter reality shows up on paper and screen.
I felt the horses galloping over my head, and the intense smell of dung and grass all over the racecourse. The sun was hitting vertical on the tracks and the noise of the hoofs from ground level waved electric through my body like an approaching stampede. I was totally in awe, riding my high, feeling so alive, so receptive, eager to absorb the moment and never let it go.
I’m not one of those people who go in raptures often. I’m quite latent, quite unaroused, secretly and silently passionate.
How much I owe to the woman who opened me up to this kind of bewilderment, striking truth into the eyes I now resist to shut.
It impresses me to no end the capacity of her presence to change my filters, to domesticate time and light in behalf of a clearer perception, to change the trajectory of my artistic purpose, to put my fears on hold, to make me proud of myself (as capable of love her in return, as deserving of her company), to encourage me to risk beyond comfort zone, turning all things threatening into potentially warmhearted, welcoming, hospitable ones, by melting my suits of armor and giving me my curiosity and my adventurous drive back.
I went into the shower, pleasantly tired of living fully. Just like a kid or a lover.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Bareback ride
So lost
At the firtst sight, she reminded me Jane March cooking naked in Bruce Willis’s kitchen.
I didn’t even realize that my wife was about to arrive home with the groceries. Of course, she was not naked under a white apron with embroidery flounces and not baking cookies for me either, but I was speachless, paralyzed by her arrogance and candor to break into my kitchen like a burglar, covered only by a thin, almost transparent T-shirt, no bra, and a pair of jean shorts, soaking wet.
‘Who the hell are you?’ I asked in a harsh whisper, as if someone could hear us.
She was leaning on the marble worktop and adopting a naughty, deceptively naive and seductive pose. After a calculated silent lapse she said ‘I’m so lost’.
Don’t ask me how a grown up man, a married man, a self-made man, a father, a responsible adult could let himself get caught in a trap like that. I have no clue. I used to be one of those claiming life sentence for child and teen sexual offenders.
She seemed like she used sex to get a fix, to ease some kind of deep emotional pain. She seemed to be hooked on it, she craved me like an addict craves drugs. And she acted older than sixsteen. I know it’s not an excuse, but she acted older than sixteen.
We did it in less than five minutes, fiercely. And in those five minutes I had a blowjob, a soggy hookup and a back door raid better than anything before in my whole life. I came into her, groaning like a beast. Such a bang, such a seizure, such a liberation. The garage door opened just when I was making up my suit. My wife was asking help with the bags.
All of a sudden I realized she wasn’t there anymore. I came out from the trance like if someone punched my stomach. My heart was pounding wildly, my face felt feverish, and my clothes were wet. I filled a jar with water and I smashed it against the tiles, trying to arrange a plausible scenario to justify my messy looks. My wife didn’t notice the tiny footsteps, but she found a bra on one of the deckchairs by the pool and nail tracks in my back a few hours later.
I am sleeping on the couch and she is giving me a silent treatment, while she decides if I deserve to be forgiven or not. And if you ask me if I deserve, I say I don’t.
But I can’t take her wet, tiny, juicy body off my mind. I can’t think about anything else.
It’s killing me.
May love take your eyes by storm
I love her more than I love photography.
I’m not composing a visual memoir of our relationship.
I refuse to get personal here. Your gaze is up to you.
I walk by her side, sometimes delaying my steps to fall behind, just to gain a better perspective of her tender, absent minded and quiet beauty.
If Internet didn’t exist, these shots would be in a shoe box for my secret and private solace.
She appeared into my life when I was totally lacking the hundred layers of protection that had cushioned my soul for decades and since then, every photo is a long kiss behind the curtain.
We walk the dog together as John and Yoko laid in the white bed and you see what your memory tells you to see: your own unedited feeling of passion.
May love take your eyes by storm
I love her more than I love photography.
I’m not composing a visual memoir of our relationship.
I refuse to get personal here. Your gaze is up to you.
I walk by her side, sometimes delaying my steps to fall behind, just to gain a better perspective of her tender, absent minded and quiet beauty.
If Internet didn’t exist, these shots would be in a shoe box for my secret and private solace.
She appeared into my life when I was totally lacking the hundred layers of protection that had cushioned my soul for decades and since then, every photo is a long kiss behind the curtain.
We walk the dog together as John and Yoko laid in the white bed and you see what your memory tells you to see: your own unedited feeling of passion.
Six degrees of separation (Take One)
The girl with the dark glasses doesn’t know she is a swine flu carrier.
The older woman with the white bag standing behind her is the mother of the emergency room doctor that is going to diagnose her tomorrow.
The absent minded boy with a hand in his pocket is going to fall in love with the Peruvian girl that works in the bakery along with the man walking towards him across the street.
The black urban surfer with the black bag was once helped by a volunteer when he arrived to the coast of Cadiz in a patera, and the volunteer happens to be the father of the girl in white boots by his side.
The boy and the woman to the right of the photograph have stolen food at the supermarket where the girl with dark glasses works as a cashier.
The doctor in the emergency room still dreams about melting beneath the hands of the girl in white boots, who works as a masseur in a gym.
We all fit together in the endless slideshow of the One who will never let go anything unseen.
Disjuncture
We don’t live in the land of plenty any more.
I turn on the television and see the queues of the unemployed.
Every few days people close to us are fired from their jobs.
I’m dissolving throughout urban wandering. A moment at a time, a shot at a time is all I can manage. The feeling that whatever I portrait turns to be unreliable haunts me, leaves me at the periphery, no matter the aesthetic prism I filter the raw material throughout, no matter my good intentions.
Most of the days, I sort the pictures trying to assemble a coherent whole, and can’t pick enough of them to tell a story, but I stubbornly try, although knowing that most of them are too private, that they spare the viewer nothing, that I shouldn’t have shown the poignant truth of human despair. It reminds me Buenos Aires in the time of the corralito: sleepwalkers, men and women with sad and worried sick eyes, pedestrians prowling around the trash containers, skinny dogs.
Then I go to Annie Leibovitz’s photo call, and I find all this much-a-do-about-nothing about her private exhibition (Susan Sontag dying, father dying, late pregnancy, domestic snapshots of questionable intimacy and artistic value), perhaps a bit fatuous and flat in a time that claims for the dignity and sobriety of Dorothea Lange’s style of work.
I can’t help asking myself what would Susan think of this baloney if she were among us.
Artifice
The movie takes place over a single day. From the very first moment you know that you are about to be the witness of an imminent downfall. Both want to be loved, or maybe it’s all about the contrary.
‘What the fuck’, he says in one of the first scenes. ‘Without you, mine would be a life of absolute misery’. Then he points a loaded gun to his own head, trying to make her change her mind. But she doesn’t. It scares the shit out of you, it seems so real.
The girl walks towards the guy, as if going barefoot across a death defying tightrope. She gives him a knife and says ‘go ahead’. He takes the knife but does nothing.
I think ‘It takes balls to document the end of an affair with a steadycam’.
It is supposed to be autobiographical so you stay there, stuck to the theater stall, expecting something gruesome to happen as the girl was stabbed in a motel two years ago. You wonder if it’s all true, some kinda snuff, some kinda psychological violence like Albee’s.
Try to stop seeing, if you can. That’s the texture of morbid vérité.
And in the midst of that high impact dramatic climax, the girl starts talking about a fantasy she has with fucking machines. People roar with laughter.
No blood, no anything. An hour and a half of shadows and a voice-over.
I’ll tell you something, man: owning a camera doesn’t make your freaking movie worth viewing.
Look alike
There’s a photograph of a young Doris Lessing sitting on the edge of a bed with white sheets. She is smoking, smiling, looking towards the lens as if she loved the photographer.
The light of the morning is coming from her left side. Wavy bangs and a soft v-neck pullover frame her features in a way one immediately falls into her: powerful, boundless, bottomless, mysterious.
D. is the most devoted reader of Lessing I know and I’ve just realized that both share the same photogenic singularities: sweet inquisitive gaze, a sun-welcoming skin, an uncalculated slouchiness, and the sophistication of not posing at all.