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
That great golden hive of the Invisible
Some days after knowing about the cheating, I went to a mountain retreat with some friends.
We bathed naked in the river, we had miso soup for dinner and meditated in behalf of clarity.
Rilke wrote that all insights occur after the fact: I was scared to death, but feeling relieved by
dissolution.
My hands felt unbearably hot and I was struggling hard with a lagged need for physical
containment. In that warmth I flash backed the dilapidation, the rust, the spoilage, the washout and wreck of the previous years.
The one you live with can be a spiritual master or a scrubby guru.
The one you live with can bring your essence to light or brush truth and beauty aside until you become a dead one walking.
Since then I’ve experienced a progressive turnaround and major adjustments.
I love my daughters and my girl beyond what I thought possible.
I arised refreshed from doubt and surrendered to photography as a life-long calling.
Everything is there, disturbingly appealing to the senses, reclaiming the lost years from precariousness and seclusion, ready to bloom.
Stripping naked at the gates of Assisi
Photography is my primary coping behavior.
I take photographs of what I’m scared to own, lose or let go of.
I take photographs of what I fear or secretly wish to become.
I take photographs of cyclical nightmares.
I wordlessly beg for a proof of my deserving.
I hide behind the focus like a shy actor on stage.
Photography has also become my universal prayer, the multiple portrait of my flaws, the endless list of my unmet needs.
Photography makes me invisible so I can finally become visible in a figurative sense.
I get a grip on light so I can explain shadows.
Photography is for me the weird experience of being born, falling in love, falling out of love and then dying in one hundredth of a second.
Brief bolts strucking the forest
The other girl survived the pact and I’m enraged. For a moment I wish her life to be taken, too.
I hate those parents counting the minutes behind the glass walls of the Intensive Care Unit.
I want them to mourn and grieve, I want their lives shattered like mine. I want the mechanical ventilator to stop. I want her breath to stop. Her heart to stop. Her life to stop.
As I watch the news coverage in the mute Tv set in the corner of the waiting room, I feel the guilt, the remorseful playback and a muddy river of useless questions crawling in my brain like worms in a tin can.
It was not my fault. I gave her everything she wanted, I gave her whatever she asked for. I worked sixteen hours a day for her to receive the most exquisite education.
I can’t let myself close the eyes. If I do, even for a moment, I see the policemen cutting the rope, taking her down from the tree just like Jesus was taken down from the cross on Virgin Mary’s lap. Not as sweetly, of course. Not as glamurously.
I could not shut my eyes then either. I was in total wonderment of the whole scene, as in a CSI episode. I could see the flash of cameras like brief bolts strucking across the forest, breaking the dawn’s dim ligh. I could see the paramedics rushing through the CPR, I could hear one of them saying “She’s back, let’s go”. I could feel my knees on the cold ground and the sudden rage pulling my body up and then that scream like a vomit through the cords of the throat, my own scream in that same forest we set our camping tents just before the divorce mixed with the feeling of my daughter’s body last seconds struggle to live.
It cannot be true she snorted neat lines of coke in the bathroom during playtime on a regular basis. It cannot be possible she snorted her pocket money away in powder for years. They tell me she has got a hole in her nose like long time junkies. They tell me that she logged a hundred times in an Internet suicide chatroom. It cannot be true. She was the best little girl in the world.
She must have been bullied extensively or something.