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.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Close enough
On releasing the burden
There’s a feeling of hallucination when I take photographs in the context where photography is exposed and ‘officially’ recognized as a work of art.
The ever evolving, handy, portable and easily available media devices have made anyone with a camera an amateur photographer and anyone with a blog a writer or a journalist. Some of them are even entitled to be pros, and the air-built line between making photographs and just shooting randomly, compulsively photoshopping and immediately exposing them in the Internet, has been totally blown up. Forever, I’m afraid. We are saturated, engorged, overstuffed with casual, dispirited stuff. The Information Age Reality has become a percolating, pervasive monster that ejects, bursts forth, eructates, expels and pours out all kinds of aimless and redundant material.
That makes it much harder to strengthen and cherish a strong vocation, a strong artistic identity, and leap towards the bliss of it, just as Joseph Cambell wrote, in order to find true satisfaction and completion doing what we, the artistically driven, love. In a world where the ability to distinguish real art from casual crap is lost, all photographers and
most writers are struggling, forced to work out of the realms of their passion, in demoralizing and creatively exhausting jobs to pay the rent and the bills.
That’s why, when I go to gallery exhibitions, and I take photos there, a strong, mixed and overwhelming feeling of anger, excitement, jealousy, impatience and awe, invades me, like sensing the future for a second, like feeling the nervous jitters of my first real solo vernissage, like hearing the voices of loved ones and friends, their congratulations, their warmth and happy presence, validating not only the part of beauty I owe to the world, the work well done, the burning drive to serve as a channel or an intermediary for some kind of much needed spiritual message to see deeper and beyond what appears to be, so they can feel free and whole just for that moment.
Then I awake to my senses and follow my arm and my hand where intuition is guiding them and something funny happens: I’m relieved from the burden, from the heavy luggage of those old unmet needs of unconditional love, approval, praise and recognition and I’m only appreciative of what surrounds me, and I know it’s all about not giving up the faith of life to spare the walls for my work to tell a story. If not now, tomorrow, but it has already happened.
I vowed to fulfill my loved one’s needs without betraying myself, because photography is the main vehicle of my love for them all. The only thing I can do for a living that actually makes me feel loving and alive. And galleries feel just like home.
Stieglitz
At the beginning, Alfred Stieglitz thoroughly manipulated his photographs to imitate paintings. Later, he dismantled any remains of pictorial rules and committed to straight photography: little or no cropping, retouching or artificial alteration. This giant leap gave it the dignity and sovereignty of an art of its own.
His work doesn’t age nor die. Like good novels and classic films it survives any preposterous definition of the critics, any comparison, any classification that comes in its way.
A straightforward, honest, stripped bare observation and humble recording of the moment is a landslide victory over impermanence. Even death symbols should bring to mind the silence of no judgment, the raw awareness of the unspeakable.
The escort
She had a deep longing for someone who didn’t want to change her habits, thoughts or looks. She was done with an authoritarian father, bossy lovers, macho managers and contemptuous therapists.
After a decade of serial dating, she picked up the phone and officially became a regular escort client.
At some point as grown up, a woman may find great relief in the integrity of her bliss, and stop asking for permission or absolution for what she really wants.
Most of her girlfriends are jealous and they comment upon her behavior when she’s not present.
She is not that old to pay for company, and she is sexy, more than the average. Why should she get a gigolo, then?
There’s a certain body language indicative of discomfort or boredom in a man.
I’m a photographer. My job is to read other’s minds through their gestures.
Believe me. The guy was at home with her.
She sucked on a chupachups while paying absorbed attention to the races.
He was leaning his chest on her back, softly holding her hips.
I imagined that perfect red manicure running on his chiseled rear delts or pecs.
The portrait of perfect love.
Playing the cast
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.
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.
The whisperer
Like a hunter, patiently awaiting for its prey, Carla spent fifteen years for him to exhaust his energy, his sexual drive, his hunger for all things expensive and exciting, his eleventh lover, his eleventh breakup, and finally, when he had been fired and gone through full-blown bankruptcy, and was bleeding from a coke-hole in his nasal septum, she approached him in the street, not far away from his attic and said hello.
Power driven men are the easiest to blackmail and put into trance.
Certainly, he didn’t care she was a little plump, he didn’t notice that she wasn’t his type of girl.
He couldn’t think about anything but their advantageous encounter and he couldn’t remember anything but that night she whispered him out from fear in the summer camp.
They spent the evening making an inventory of the last decade.
They moved together three weeks later.
He is dogmatic about the blessing that was to find his first love.
Don’t even try to change his mind about Carla. He will fire you.
Ines in the aftertime
I know it’s fated. Sooner than later I will go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I will have to work it through her precious innocence lost, her first boyfriend, her first break up crisis, her first rebellious declaration of independence, her first everything lousy that might come to her along the way.
And I will see in all her temporary failures, my own failure to fix the world perfect, to model an ideal partner in her mind or to show myself imperfect enough, protecting a romantic mystery of her own making.
And after the mandatory time of grief, I hopefully will find in her come back the comfort of a father, the balmy and cleansing remains of blamelessness, the colors of her childhood kindling the arctic crisp of gray hair and skepticism. And finally, I will feel grateful and enraptured with love and pride, as I’ve always been.