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.
Published on Julio 24, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Record, Street Tags: all about me, anima mia, blemished, revelations
As knowledge is born from the desire to know, vision is born from the desire to see.
Art is the drive to share both, knowledge and vision.
Every artist is dancing naked in the dark, drunk with anticipation, taking risks into the unknown and the impossible, so the audience can confirm or argue down their understanding of what is real and find solace in the certainness of transcendence.
Time is humbled through art. Artists are the warriors of all things impermanent and eventually, they give us a focus, a notion of mystery, always available for an intimate dialogue.
In our times, the dominant misunderstanding between the artist and the audience is all the media-noise telling us where to look and what to see, wrecking any possibility of real awakening or awareness, establishing the rules in behalf of marketing.
Media-feeding can provide images and concepts, but cannot substitute the feeling of true initiation or satisfy our original, untouched and ever new desire for authenticity. And what is worse: it numbs our awareness, it snaps us out of truth, and makes us forget those who bet the bushes in the jungle of meaning only to carve the maps of this brave new world.
Published on Junio 17, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Record, Remix, Start shooting Tags: Canogar, Chillida, Saura, Ugo Mulas
Ava bought a house in La Moraleja. A house with a witch-shaped weathervane on the roof, called La Bruja. She paid 66.000 dollars for it in 1954. Then she moved to a flat in Oquendo and finally to a duplex in Doctor Arce, right above Peron’s apartment, while the argentinian ex-dictator was exiled in Madrid.
Against all popular sayings about housekeepers tendency to gossip, the janitor of her last residence in Spain -retired and old, but yet very clear minded- still refuses to reveal any secret about the rave bacchanals running upstairs, which made Peron go mad very often.
According Ava, Peron had one very disturbing trait. He would often march out onto his balcony, and make loud, arm-waving speeches to the empty street below. The speeches disturbed his next-door neighbor, who felt he let down the tone of the vicinity.
Ava had always been a potty mouth. She knew that the pejorative Spanish word for homosexual was maricón which rhymes nicely with Perón. So every time he step onto his balcony and began to demagogue his invisible supporters, she gathered her assistants and formed an opposition party by chanting in unison Perón es un maricón, Perón es un maricón.
He hated her wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, Ava attended secret teas with María Estela and loved her home made empanadas.
The Barefoot Comtessa would sleep all day and get up to go to Oliver, Riscal (Archy, nowadays) and Chicote after dark. Tequilas, Old Fashions, Mai Tais and Manhattans were served to her in a row until closing time. Most barmans were told never to charge her the drinks. A lady in waiting who always hanged around called the taxis and pushed her into them and then into bed, if she didn’t pick up a bailaor or a young torero to sleep with, in her futile attempts to forget Frank Sinatra.
A few witnesses of those post-war Hollywood years in Spain remember that she even drove fast cars across the city outskirts, completely drunk, landing herself in crashes no one but her could leave unharmed.
They also remember her whimsical exercise in abounding excess, her exuberance, her generosity, her magnificent audacity to make choices and face the consequences without a trace of pathos, sulks or self-pity.
She was really determined to fit in and would ask in her best Spanish, ¿Quieres una copita? or let the gypsies plop their babies on her lap to hold during flamenco dances.
Wild and innocent at the core, flamboyant and perpetually undone, she was even barred from the Ritz for peeing in the lobby, but if you ask the ones that shared those wild years with her, all of them will say she was larger than life and most of all, unforgettable.
Reportedly, a lone black limousine parked behind the crowd at Ava’s funeral.
No one left the vehicle, but everyone assumed that the anonymous mourner was Frank Sinatra. Later, a beautiful floral arrangement at the graveside simply read: “With My Love, Francis”.
Published on Mayo 19, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Record, Remix Tags: ava gardner, juan domingo perón
This light shining through my flesh upon things on to the ground. This light that I can barely name. This life belt, this umbilical cord, this secular appearance of a revenant God, this momentary oblivion of me.
Published on Mayo 18, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Departure of reality, Record Tags: anima mia, Anyone can do it, revelations
She was a child prodigy in the 80’s. She could play five of the most difficult instruments and won a bunch of contests, dragged from one to the next by an histrionic mother, desperate for attention.
At sixteen she realized her queerness. At twenty two she killed victim zero.
Since then, she has been perfecting her normal, average life, suppressing one human annoyance at a time. She needs no redemption, no absolution, no amnesty or discharge.
On the verge of forties, she still settles for second best, secretly thinking she deserves better.
Her father swears that she is the best daughter anyone could have. Her mother spends evenings looking at photographs and news scraps of the time both were celebrities.
Her angelic visage and her virtuosity playing the organ, the piano, the violin, the cello can fool anyone.
She has no fears, no feelings of guilt or remorse. An exquisitely peaceful face. Even her natural, impersonal process choosing you as the next prey may be charming.
Her true nature remains invisible to the rest of the world.
She is a skilled mind reader.
Conscience can be a great handicap. Think about it.
Ask yourself how would you live your life if you had such an advantage over the majority.
Published on Mayo 13, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Record Tags: mental, unexpected
Consciously develop a pattern of grandiosity in both fantasy and behaviour.
Seek for admiration or adulation.
Feel entitled to success and notoriety.
Get as many people as possible to be part of your pictures.
Get as many people as possible to see them.
Get them naked (play with their need for love, approval, self-comparison, rebellion, narcissistic supply).
Be sure they are average.
Get yourself arrested several times for disorderly conduct.
Make your lawyer get all your charges dropped for the sake of art.
Make the whole crap newsworthy. Make the front pages of almost every national newspaper.
Call it an ‘installation’.
Work at sunrise when the traffic jams are utterly annoying.
Establish a record of naked people.
Then establish a record of naked people in a single photograph.
Then beat your own record.
Unintentionally recall the photos from Nazi concentration camps.
Remember that it’s not the telling but the showing that counts.
Hire or invite celebrity guests to your installations.
Proclame yourself an artist, regardless of true merit.
Define the whole thing as “a living organism of hundreds of bodies forming a landscape, the relationship between the anonymity of public space and the human body”.
Rinse and repeat.
Anyone can do it.
Published on Abril 23, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Record, Street, Without words Tags: Anyone can do it, Seek for admiration, Tunick
