One firm spot on which to stand to move the earth

One firm spot on which to stand to move the earth

They teach me what I need to come fully alive and how to move from one moment to another as if life were a scavenger hunt.
They are also the center of gravity, the axis, the omphalos, the pivot, the transversal line that bind my worst fears: to lose them, to see them lost or hurt, to lose myself without having anchored and supplied their basic rights and needs.
Sometimes I get into some sort of inner do-or-die state of mind, a sudden divergence in my habitual style of slow cautious progress, and get antsy about shyness and this apparently natural inclination to underachievement, despite the flaming passion that drives me to photography.
It’s a wild, ambitious, greedy thing: I want a big house (for them to spend the weekends and holidays with me), I want to be famous and recognized as an artist (for them to be proud of me), I want to buy expensive things (for them to feel special), and I’m ashamed of my banal desires all at once. I’m all hollow scared of whatever the wire pulling that might may make them feel fatherless, insecure or unsupported, but also to neglect the artistic values I go after and I’m trying to be loyal as a legacy.
I take the train and travel a great deal of miles every Friday so I can give them the only richness I can offer now: my love, my physical presence, my voice soothing their growing pains and angst, and then I travel or drive back to arrive on time, have a shower and go to work, utterly exhausted.
What does it take to be seen as the only thing you can be and to earn money doing the only thing you love to do in the world? It depends so much on other people’s perception and priorities. Should I sacrifice my vocational dictum to get that money? What would I be teaching them, if so?
Most of the things beautiful and valuable and the people I couldn’t live without, I found during times and situations that demanded a lot from me or pushed me on and over this comfort zone of mine that I seldom probe. But the greatest values and lessons put before me (truth, trust, patience, surrender, love, integrity to face what I am and what I want, standing up for it even if it annoys other people and baffles my ‘likeability’) have arised from struggle and discomfort.
Robert Frost wrote that he had been through a long standing lover quarrel with life.
Maybe I can’t give my girls all the amenities that money can give (yet), but I can be an advocate of their blooming affair with upcoming opportunities and travel a ridiculous batch of miles just to hearten their beauty and breath in the audacious wisdom of their untouched instinct, and to bed cover them before sleep, in such a deep gratitude for their teaching and their existence, which is my most powerful source of motivation so far.
Maybe in the future they can read these lines and find in them the proof of their preciousness, that firm spot on which I stand to move the earth.

Published on junio 11, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Sense Tags: , ,

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Farewell, Miss Ventriloquist

Farewell, Miss Ventriloquist

I’m pretty sure that the eyes are erogenous organs and erogenous zones. They touch, they taste, they talk, they sing, they smell love and danger, they reach the untouchable, they give a name to all things left behind and disowned, they build cathedrals of meaning and they are the supreme artists of inquiry.
I love so much and so dearly the foreign worlds you bring to mine, naked from noise and clutter so I can touch them through this window of phobic convalescence, and let them in and touch me in spite of ancient terrors and disturbing memories, in spite of my reluctance to let myself be touched and embraced. I so much appreciate the simplicity of your glance, free from any intention to sell anything, and I have been privileged to be the fugitive voice of all those strangers, and most of all, to play your voice for a while, as if I were you doing the click, or even better, as if we were doing it together as a team.

My whole vision of the world has changed along sixteen weeks of walking your eyes, instead of your shoes. And it has changed forever.

Thank you for this bewildering joyride.
From the bottom of my heart.

Paz Puente Greene

From the bottom of my heart.

Published on agosto 18, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Street Tags:

Heart is a weapon the size of a fist

Heart is a weapon the size of a fist

I have a real soft spot for some strangers that look straight into my eyes and cry for help without a word, without a tear, without stopping to say ‘hey, you, I’m completely lost and screwed up, let’s share a beer, come on, I’ll pay the drinks… Don’t know where to start, let’s say I’ve been fired from my job, some days I want to kill my wife and cut my children to pieces, but I’m a good guy, so I will probably shoot my head off with my brother’s gun.’
Neither of us stop, I go home as if someone had hit me with desperate eyes in the middle of the stomach and food tastes bitter and I somewhat pray for my work to be like one of those cardiopulmonary reanimation devices of emergency rooms and ambulances. One capable of shocking almost dead lives into hope or into wonder or into awareness or indignation or into sweetness, or into love, or into innocence or into each other. Again.

Published on agosto 17, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Street Tags:

On the photographer's identity

On the photographer's identity

I start with nothing and I try to make something of it. That’s all.
Sometimes I get too serious and transcendent about my work, but to say the truth (or at least something truer), taking photographs is the only way I’ve found to take my way-to-perfect-and- way-too-rigid-to- be- real inner child out to play.
He doesn’t care a shit about framing or lighting. He sees Mickey Mouse where the Aesthete sees walls to paint. He goes for love and wonder hunt and I should follow him more often in his shy, yet powerful desire to begin now, again, all over, from pure scratch.

Published on agosto 14, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Sense, Victim of a foolish heart Tags:

Public is the new private

Public is the new private

Trying to dig deeper, under and beyond the obvious meaning and to make the girl the center of the photo, I suddenly understood Barthe’s concept around significance.
“What is significance? It is meaning, insofar as it is sensually produced”.
There’s something violent in this photo, a punctum, a word pulling images out of our minds and before our eyes. An image that is not the girl, but in the girl, and takes us out of the gallery, out of the exhibition and into bed.

Published on agosto 13, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Departure of reality

Trompe-l'oeil

Trompe-l'oeil

Paz would have loved this girl. Her true inner joy jumping from the eyes like a bouncy puppy with a frisky tail. A kind hearted woman in a tight black dress like liquid licorice candy.
She had the appearance of a trompe-l’oeil, emerging from the dirty walls, coming out from nowhere through an inexistent door. And if in that very moment Paz had been there and the dj played Cherry Coloured Funk, I’m pretty sure she would have asked the girl to dance.
Sometimes I wonder why she is unable to leave her fortress and come to visit us and join me in these safaris, instead of sharing our lives only through photos and mails. Why she thinks they are truer than life itself, and if that statement of hers is really a compliment or just an excuse to remain detached and disconnected.

Published on agosto 12, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Lovely bestiary

A case of intimacy

A case of intimacy

The convenience and facility of digital photography has totally changed the photographer’s sense of commitment, and plagued the media of mere noise and marginalia profusely documented.
The trivia of everything is sucking the essence of life itself, in its most ineffable, ungraspable parts: those that can trigger the relevant questions and move us towards personal and creative expansion.
What made the fields, the rose and the fox special was not their nature of field, rose, and fox but the blossoming love of the Little Prince. It was (it is) a case of intimacy. Lawrence Durrell, in his Alexandria Quartet wrote that one can love a city only because a loved one lives in it. This is so true, and can be extrapolated to every place and moment in the world.
That’s how art acquires transcendence.

If you close your eyes, and look at this photograph, you’ll hear one of David Sylvian’s songs sweetly and sadly eroding my heart, soothing my mind from trouble, doubt and trouble and you’ll be able to touch the skin of the dawn or the sunset.
I will print it for you realize that all this too much, too fast, too many, too soon you are seeking for comfort is preventing you from noticing how close you are to the source of all wonder in its most pure form and simplicity.
My purpose is to make it tangible for you.
You’ll never imagine how committed I am to drag this beauty, all the beauty of the world to your door. Now.
It is baffling, overwhelming, almost impalpable, transient. And it’s yours to embrace. It’s my offering, my votive contribution, my alms fee, the ashes of time at the borders of what makes us one rather than us alone, or you, or me.

Published on agosto 11, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Departure of reality, Lovely bestiary, Music Tags: ,

Evidence of the dearly departed

Evidence of the dearly departed

I saw several bodies missing from their shoes that night.
It was funny to notice how willing they were to go barefoot, or naked or disappear.
And how disturbing the symbols of their sadness were left behind, like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs or as a proof that they once existed.
Every shoe reflected the personality of the departed.
People say that dogs and owners share their facial features.
I say that shoes are even more accurate regarding human character.

Published on agosto 10, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Lovely bestiary

Angstlust

Angstlust

They pretend they’re having a great time, and they are, actually, in a perplexing contradictory manner: getting a big deal of pleasure from angst itself.
They seem to be aloof even from each other, although deeply focused on the efficient setting of the script, their part in the play, the image-based definition of whatever they believe about who they are and where they are going (motionless, maybe, stuck in time, and stuck in purpose).
I move around, dwelling in my invisibility, asking myself if unlimited eyes are enough to grasp what’s going on beyond the trivial, the false, the futile, asking myself what is connected to what in the room, struggling to surrender to the surroundings. Struggling despite the spirits I’ve conjured, running away from the ghosts of memory, striping off the layers of significance, imagining what would it be like to add or to remove any of the figures from the scene, just like limp figures in a wax museum, and in that blissful moment I find the elusive feeling of the right place, right moment, shivering through my veins, and I take the photo empty of thought, empty of guessing, not even concerned about if the whole act drop will still be holding your mind a second after your glance departed the frame. And I’m perfectly ok if it isn’t. Perfectly ok with that.

Published on agosto 7, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Lovely bestiary