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.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
On releasing the burden
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.
Artifice
The movie takes place over a single day. From the very first moment you know that you are about to be the witness of an imminent downfall. Both want to be loved, or maybe it’s all about the contrary.
‘What the fuck’, he says in one of the first scenes. ‘Without you, mine would be a life of absolute misery’. Then he points a loaded gun to his own head, trying to make her change her mind. But she doesn’t. It scares the shit out of you, it seems so real.
The girl walks towards the guy, as if going barefoot across a death defying tightrope. She gives him a knife and says ‘go ahead’. He takes the knife but does nothing.
I think ‘It takes balls to document the end of an affair with a steadycam’.
It is supposed to be autobiographical so you stay there, stuck to the theater stall, expecting something gruesome to happen as the girl was stabbed in a motel two years ago. You wonder if it’s all true, some kinda snuff, some kinda psychological violence like Albee’s.
Try to stop seeing, if you can. That’s the texture of morbid vérité.
And in the midst of that high impact dramatic climax, the girl starts talking about a fantasy she has with fucking machines. People roar with laughter.
No blood, no anything. An hour and a half of shadows and a voice-over.
I’ll tell you something, man: owning a camera doesn’t make your freaking movie worth viewing.
Guinea Pig
The goal was to create emotions in the game, the ultimate ludicrous experience and she was one of the human subjects of the control experiment.
The first check was spent at Zara and the second at a Mac Store.
She only had to play two hours a day non stop in a lab, to report any changes in perception or behavior and to keep the secret, obviously.
The game slightly reminded her of Second Life or The Sims, but in just a minute of play she was rushed into her childhood or her teens, and an impolite, blatant alternative self had taken over the control of everything, making brutal amends or satisfying forbidden desires and needs.
On the other side, just out of the screen, reality warped totally out of proportion and she loved that.
She loved the universal permission to freak out in a borderline way, her bizarre, nameless hunger left out like a wild beast, the tingling flood of happenstance kicking inside her central nervous system. After a few weeks she had turned into a female version of House M.D. Ill-mannered, brutally honest, witty, disrespectful, brilliant.
Things started to go awry. At this point, she was having atrocious fantasies I can’t even describe in these pages, even though she was still able to constrain ill drives and maintain a sense of reality.
Now, in the aftermath of her suicide, her latest battered boyfriend is trying to sell the exclusive of her diaries to the tabloids and the white-robe men in the lab have sent their bullyboys to get rid of the problem.
Figure that.
Art and Intimacy
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.
Ceci n´est pas un Jodorowsky
A naked bonzo burned to ashes upon my retina, kindly agreeing to pose near the book stands.
Within that brief time lag I was a nobody, too. We barely talked. Nothing personal, nothing cardinal, nothing transcendental along with the click of the shutter, although he left a fading scent of selflessness, the dust of pilgrims and a silent, subversive trail of questions behind.
Would you erase yourself to write, to do or to give a poem?
Would you agree to have a disposable name?
Would you chop off your feet not to step over other people’s shadow?
Would you reject any private right or comfort if it not shared with everyone else?
Would you throw yourself into the candent abyss of the unthinkable?
Can you set fire to the house of incest?
Can you do without the countless gains of your affliction?
Who would you be without the ones you blame?
Are you daring enough to drop your parent’s dogma?
What if not finding what you are looking for means finding yourself?
What keeps you from letting everything fall away for things to be as easy, wondrous and simple as they should be if words didn’t exist, if you didn’t have a name or even a life to call yours?
If all wisdom could be merged in one koan or mitzvah, capable of answering to the basic human inquests, kindling good deeds and random acts of grace, maybe his life stance would suit the universal bon mot: just be poetry and give it away outrageously, blazing up through every moment of miraculous possibility.
Then he answered an incoming call to his cellular.
Ordinary, tenderhearted, unangelic, ready to be no more.
Disease
My life as a sick person began the day I got married. Everyone seemed to think that I should not wait to tie the knot, as I was thirty and single, which was the same to say that I had already become a spinster. Family matchmakers usually mistake similar lifestyle and habits for real connection. Besides there’s no reason to stay alone if you can share your misery with someone alike. We both are aloof, old-fashioned and quite unexciting people. It was pure common sense to pair us and it naturally happened in my sister’s wedding banquet. Obviously, they were in a hurry to get rid of ‘my problem’ and I couldn’t say no the popular demand.
We danced, we started to date and we finally got engaged.
There was nothing actually wrong with him, although he was quite down in the shadows: a laconic, methodical and flat forty-two year old man. The kind of man who gets up at half past six in the morning every day, and goes to bed at eleven every night, after rinsing his mouth and gargling exactly seventy times, not more, nor less.
The atrocious headaches started during our honeymoon in Benidorm and didn’t get any better in the following days. Imagine the bright sun, the holiday noise, the crowded beaches, the open-air dances and my brains smashed with an invisible hammer no matter the pain killers I was swallowing down like candy.
Although the bizarre auras and disturbing delusions caused by migraine I managed to keep the house clean and tidy, to cook, iron and do the groceries without going mad.
After our first anniversary everyone started to wonder about the babies. We went through the procedure twice a week, but the babies didn’t come and we stopped trying when I reached my forties. We got twin beds and watched television.
Neither of us had great expectations about the other. He was noiseless and respectful, he never complained about my aches and pains and I stopped longing for a more communicative and affectionate husband as a newly-wed, so the marriage worked fine according the standards.
But one day he got up and in the middle of his morning shave he told me that he had a business travel to Malaga that same morning, the first in twenty years of marriage. He left with a small suitcase and a hand bag, he kissed me and announced he was coming back on Sunday.
I spent five days alone, totally migraine free. I was bursting with energy, I wanted to go out and buy new clothes, change my haircut and even call old friends, go to the cinema and dine out.
I was so blissful, so thrilled, so elated that took me almost three days to do the math and establish a direct link between despair and my husband.
An embittered flare up of animosity traveled through my entire body: he had been sucking my energy from the very first moment we met. I hated him, I hated the people who blackmailed us into marriage and I wanted to clear the venom out of me once and forever.
On Saturday night I seasoned his soup with insecticide. He survived and bashfully dismissed my crime as if it were a trivial, marginal event. At the hospital, they asked him about me and he alleged he had been away for a week and already felt sick in the journey back from Malaga. They declared the whole thing an accidental poisoning and I forbear the stabbing headaches as part of my punishment.
Maybe happiness is not for everybody.
One should be grateful for the small givens without asking for more.