We are so used to notice things in a numb trance, in order to save every slice and every morsel of life for later, that only when faced to a great deal of loss, tragedy, turmoil, fear and misadventure, totally crack-open we allow ourselves to feel, and to love and to mourn, and even to take a path of our choice and making. Jumping into the void, leaping, fearless.
When reality swings us down over the edge, we aknowledge the wild nature of our hearts, the preciousness of the moment, the value of each one of our encounters with the rest of us, the throbbing light of pain and pleasure, as still and silent in a black and white portrait.
Imagine what would be the story of you if all that could be rescued from a fire in your house was a small document photo of someone you loved dearly. Imagine that such a tiny, almost unsubstantial memento is the only thing you can hold on to for the rest of existence.
After imagining all your possessions absent, devastated, doomed, irretrievable, irreparable and gone, open your eyes to the wonder of now, and realize that it’s shaping the place where you belong, by this river. So instead of chasing happiness, remember it’s about just embracing everybody else in awe and gratitude, because joy doesn’t know the meaning of tomorrow.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
By this river
Atonement
Her silhouette reveals as emerging from the totally black canvas of the cabaret.
Small tight feet in kinky boots, sexy pin-up fish net stockings, velvet garter, unbelievable prude bitsy hands keeping the gates of the land of promise.
I’m not sure if I like her. The energy of the shooting comes more from morbid curiosity than from true sympathy. The camera seems pulled to the orphan male shoes by the disturbance and the bewilderment of an absence. I stop looking at her face, benumbed, careless, insensitive and start wondering about the man, entangled and later devoured by black widow.
It was not my eye that beheaded the goddess, but the camera’s.
Oh, the forbidden pleasures of symbolic revenge.
Lovely bestiary
“‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you ca’n’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’”
Lewis Carroll
Alice in Wonderland
There I am, slightly drunk and gripped by the lovely bestiary collected in the memory card. There I am, mesmerized by three beauty spots under the small boobs of the Red Queen. I wonder how the fluffy soutien stays in it’s place, but most of all I notice deep sadness or melancholy in her eyes, some kind of homesickness, some kind of saudade. And I want to hold her in my arms and say that everything is gonna be alright, but all I can do is rehearse a smile at her Ooops and be grateful to photography for providing me the endless occasion for human closeness, and for this night, for these gurus in how to take myself more lightly, the master class in the admiration of diversity. And most of all, for the ultimate sentimental reminder: sometimes we are the only thing that other stranded person has in a given moment.
Snow and chocolate
After the battles in the winter front, his great grandmother took the clothes of fresh killed corpses to protect her left children from the south-west wind and keep them warm and free from pneumonia. Her husband didn’t come back from the ranks, and two of the kids had already died as a result of hunger and cold. She was determined to keep the rest alive, even if she had to walk between a field of cadavers, and dress the children with six sizes bigger blood stained clothes and leave those poor men naked under the snow fall, and see them turning blue, then completely white and dream of them every single night, and wake up as a dead asleep herself, to gather weeds to throw into the pot. One night she considered going further, and cutting off the flesh of a thigh, ready and willing to accept condemnation for such a profanity. In that moment, the missing husband appeared through the door, rawboned, gaunt, with his sad empty eyes telling horror stories, and that arrival kept her from more battleground incursions.
They cried in silence and only talked about the children’s decease.
Next morning, everyone had a breakfast of chocolate bars he had been saving in his backpack along six months of bare subsistence.
Decades later, in the family house there must be bread and chocolate and new clothes in the wardrobes, and it’s considered unkind and of bad taste to ask about war times.
All the children are happy and obsessively well fed.
Seeking love from the devil
What you are hearing as you look at the image is not the ravenous voice of hunger, speaking out loud, working its way through the thick layers of repression. Mommy wants you to be a good boy, but she is becoming weaker than a whisper, and the new tone is the blunt, shameless, undomesticated manifestation of yourself, in a way you can see, in a way you can’t deny, in a way that moves you to action, although apparently benumbed and silent, giving you permission, opening the gates, letting out the flood.
Does it matter if it’s a poster of Lady Gaga’s next show or a girl without name at the door of a peep den? Does it matter if it’s London, Amsterdam or Madrid? Does it really matter if it’s dummy behind the windows of El Corte Inglés, or a wax figure at Madam Tussard’s?
It has worked, for the first time in your life. Better than a porno tape. Better than a Playboy. Better than Viagra. Better than Cialis. You walk faster, you reach and open the street door of your apartment building to finally make it through the craving with animal fruition, as she were going down, straddle legs, blossom red mouth, as she were the one moving your hands, your will, your loneliness, your appetite for love. A voice stronger than your mother’s. Alluring, provoking, mouth watering, juicy, irresistible. A voice in black and white. Speaking all the things forbidden and dirty.
Only for you.
In a dark time, the eye begins to see (*)
As a photographer, I’ve come to realize that certain emotions are invisible to eyes in immediate reality, but they appear, so uncanny familiar, so violent, so touching, once revealed in a photograph. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be if I couldn’t keep record of the overlooked, if I couldn’t stay a minute mindfully, compassionately connected with all the disowned selves of mine that show up in brief encounters, in relationships of no more than half of a minute.
What would my life be like if I couldn’t touch the spent threads of the past interweaved in the silken clothes of present. What kind of person would I be, unaware of the subtle evidence of human suffering meeting me at the borders of a shot?
Photography lets me feel the chill of winter on the skin and in the soul of strangers, and gives me a glimpse of their lives as a whole. It makes me aware and pushes me through the thickness of thought, more open, more available, much more tender and humble. And most of all, more careful and insightful, both qualities without which no photographer can evolve to what others call genius, and I suspect it’s the consistent choice to follow inner truth and inner knowingness, wherever they take us, whatever the moment we are meant to freeze so others can seize what really happens, what really happened and even foretell what is about to happen, beyond any attempt of self-definition.
(*) Quote by Theodore Roethke.
Happy together
He is with her because she is the perfect bonus to the car. The ultimate tuning ornament.
She is with him because the car is the perfect complement to her sculpted body.
There’s no love in their agreement. No need of mutual affection or bounden duty.
He works in his car as an extension of himself, because he can’t repair or embellish a battered childhood.
She works in her body through expensive surgery and personal trainers to heal the lousy self concept of a sexually abused child.
None of them can articulate words to tell the story and break through the pains of memory, so they reinvent identity detail by detail, again and again, in cool and narcissistic company.
Therapy is too long and burdensome.
Close enough
I humbly and faithfully cherish a lodge of mentors, most of them gone: the tutelary spirits of photography. One of the members of this lodge is Robert Capa, who said that if a photo is mediocre or lifeless, you weren’t close enough. That’s the reason why I often cross the same line that cross stalkers, voyeurs and exhibitionists.
I’m a shy, discreet man, but the need to capture life naked and off guard gives me the arrogance, the boldness, the immodesty necessary to do my best with the only precious talent I think I’ve got.