Despite my attempts to stay back, playing invisibility, some people still break the delicate balance between the image and the event, striking the pose, bringing to play all their complexes and identity struggles. While editing, I often find that they were showing off my own disowned shadows, my conflicts as an artist. But there’s a gift in random accident: the realization that no photography has a chance of getting close to perfection unless letting that script be gone, unless letting the fakery, the posing, the seduction of the model render it’s personal language. Like in a well rehearsed dance.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
The anechoic chamber
Fifty years ago, while in Harvard, John Cage went into a totally silent room, an echoic chamber. He didn’t expect to hear two sounds: his own nervous system working by itself, and the rumor of blood circulating. The reason he did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on his part. That epiphanic experience gave his life a new North: the exploration of nonintention. If he wasn’t playing that music, who was? From then on, he composed music giving up making choices, and trading will for questions. He surrendered beauty to chance, tossing three coins six times, yielding the sixty four hexagrams of I Ching to get the great-circle course of harmonics.
Sometimes, when I take photographs, life stops, the noise of the mind stops, and I can only hear my own blood stream, my body working in automatic pilot, the click like a gunshot, the vive senses (plus intuition) brought together to a single setting, into a single figure. In those moments I wish I could handle the process at will, play it slow motion, be my own witness in awe, in love. Mute.
L´esprit de l´escalier
“She might have been a beauty in her thirties”. “Well, she is still a beauty”, I thought.
Five seconds after she had vanished among the crowd, with her Channel-like hat, her self-contained elegance, her glamorous, yet casual summer outfit, holding a pair of expensive sandals with one hand and classic sun glasses with the other. Small feet barely walking on the grass, turning the head around to smile one last time. Flirty, delicate, somewhat melancholic.
“Have you seen a forty-something fair lady with a fancy hat and sandals in her hand?” I asked one of the betters with binoculars, who was noisily cheering and shouting on one of the horses in the race. He didn’t even hear me.
I looked around again but didn’t see her.
“You are not supposed to be sad at your own death” she whispered, while looking straight to the camera. I swear. I can’t let go of this strange feeling that she expected me to do something more than taking a photo.
Who knows.
Sadhearted psychodrama
It’s not their struggle for belonging, equality, social evenness and self esteem.
It’s our pitiful failure to take a warm look skin deep enough to realize that our crooked, freakish and gargoylish self image is coming back to get us.
Such a sad circus, such Grand Guignol only for us, the blind and the deaf.
Such a display of desperation carefully hidden under loads of makeup and silicone, only for us, who won’t dare to see.
Bipartisan
“Who the fuck are you calling a failure?”
The verbal lash hastily hit me down to the core, while waiting for my beer at the counter of a tavern, after doing some errands.
We all keep one or two alternative selves carefully hidden, and most of the time they faithfully assume the burden of our forbidden desires, our shameful secrets, our bitter regrets. But sometimes, when defenses are weak, or the body is tired, they turn anarch and claim their rights and unmet needs.
All of a sudden, one clearly can hear their voices, and sense their anger, and notice the power that dark emotions hold, and the only mentally sound choice is to remain immobile, passive, almost vegetative, until the uprising cools down.
Enraged intentions go away one sip of beer at a time. You pick yourself together, pay the tapas, fix the discreet smile, the good guy looks, and walk away counting the paving stones. It’s just a flare-up, the beastly attempt of truth to reset its order. As it comes, as it goes.
The annoying telephone operator will spend two hours talking in circles before restoring your connection, and you’ll be affable, polite, complaisant, as if she saved your life. And the bipartisan, the angry one, the deprived will blow the coals inwards and ask for antacids. You probably saw this thing on television, The United States of Tara. Taking the others out regularly would provide great relief, but we live in the land of hypocrisy. Airs and graces, affectation, double-dealing, lip service, double-dealing and falseheartedness. For the common good.
There’s a cafe where you get discounts for the most offensive insult. No wonder plots relish on madness.
Borderline Karoshi
Of course Mr. Mizuno can afford two mistresses. He deserves it. After all, he works sixteen hours a day with unenviable dedication (plus an hour and a half commuting).
As a matter of fact, he could afford this sort of erotic honeymoon in Madrid with more than two if he wanted. He will pay boob plastic surgery for both. And a very expensive stay at the Ritz. And then, back in Tokyo, he will go to the gardens and meditate on really profound things, purify his body in the public baths, then home to kiss Akiko and the children, and return to his normal habits. An year of sleep deprivation won’t let him enjoy other carnal pleasure than just looking at them, naked on fancy satin sheets. He will sleep long siestas while they go to their appointments with the surgeon (with a hired translator, also paid by him), or they burn the Visa in Serrano.
The only thing off limits for them is taking photos. No mementos, no souvenirs, no cameras allowed in this Spanish trip.
On photography and other dangerous pursuits
Even though some days life is a shit storm and most of things wet paper, I consider myself one of the richest and more fortunate human beings in the world.
Wonder is leading and I’m in the good direction.
The click must go on.