I start with nothing and I try to make something of it. That’s all.
Sometimes I get too serious and transcendent about my work, but to say the truth (or at least something truer), taking photographs is the only way I’ve found to take my way-to-perfect-and- way-too-rigid-to- be- real inner child out to play.
He doesn’t care a shit about framing or lighting. He sees Mickey Mouse where the Aesthete sees walls to paint. He goes for love and wonder hunt and I should follow him more often in his shy, yet powerful desire to begin now, again, all over, from pure scratch.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
On the photographer's identity
Seeking love from the devil
What you are hearing as you look at the image is not the ravenous voice of hunger, speaking out loud, working its way through the thick layers of repression. Mommy wants you to be a good boy, but she is becoming weaker than a whisper, and the new tone is the blunt, shameless, undomesticated manifestation of yourself, in a way you can see, in a way you can’t deny, in a way that moves you to action, although apparently benumbed and silent, giving you permission, opening the gates, letting out the flood.
Does it matter if it’s a poster of Lady Gaga’s next show or a girl without name at the door of a peep den? Does it matter if it’s London, Amsterdam or Madrid? Does it really matter if it’s dummy behind the windows of El Corte Inglés, or a wax figure at Madam Tussard’s?
It has worked, for the first time in your life. Better than a porno tape. Better than a Playboy. Better than Viagra. Better than Cialis. You walk faster, you reach and open the street door of your apartment building to finally make it through the craving with animal fruition, as she were going down, straddle legs, blossom red mouth, as she were the one moving your hands, your will, your loneliness, your appetite for love. A voice stronger than your mother’s. Alluring, provoking, mouth watering, juicy, irresistible. A voice in black and white. Speaking all the things forbidden and dirty.
Only for you.
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.
Bareback ride
It was Henri Bergson who wrote that the eye only sees what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
I think that the eye is only blessed by true beauty when the heart is ready to receive (and honor) whatever comes up, either if it’s beautiful or not.
There’s a powerful analogy between photography and love. The more I love, the better I see, the better I catch up the marvel moment, the brighter reality shows up on paper and screen.
I felt the horses galloping over my head, and the intense smell of dung and grass all over the racecourse. The sun was hitting vertical on the tracks and the noise of the hoofs from ground level waved electric through my body like an approaching stampede. I was totally in awe, riding my high, feeling so alive, so receptive, eager to absorb the moment and never let it go.
I’m not one of those people who go in raptures often. I’m quite latent, quite unaroused, secretly and silently passionate.
How much I owe to the woman who opened me up to this kind of bewilderment, striking truth into the eyes I now resist to shut.
It impresses me to no end the capacity of her presence to change my filters, to domesticate time and light in behalf of a clearer perception, to change the trajectory of my artistic purpose, to put my fears on hold, to make me proud of myself (as capable of love her in return, as deserving of her company), to encourage me to risk beyond comfort zone, turning all things threatening into potentially warmhearted, welcoming, hospitable ones, by melting my suits of armor and giving me my curiosity and my adventurous drive back.
I went into the shower, pleasantly tired of living fully. Just like a kid or a lover.
So lost
At the firtst sight, she reminded me Jane March cooking naked in Bruce Willis’s kitchen.
I didn’t even realize that my wife was about to arrive home with the groceries. Of course, she was not naked under a white apron with embroidery flounces and not baking cookies for me either, but I was speachless, paralyzed by her arrogance and candor to break into my kitchen like a burglar, covered only by a thin, almost transparent T-shirt, no bra, and a pair of jean shorts, soaking wet.
‘Who the hell are you?’ I asked in a harsh whisper, as if someone could hear us.
She was leaning on the marble worktop and adopting a naughty, deceptively naive and seductive pose. After a calculated silent lapse she said ‘I’m so lost’.
Don’t ask me how a grown up man, a married man, a self-made man, a father, a responsible adult could let himself get caught in a trap like that. I have no clue. I used to be one of those claiming life sentence for child and teen sexual offenders.
She seemed like she used sex to get a fix, to ease some kind of deep emotional pain. She seemed to be hooked on it, she craved me like an addict craves drugs. And she acted older than sixsteen. I know it’s not an excuse, but she acted older than sixteen.
We did it in less than five minutes, fiercely. And in those five minutes I had a blowjob, a soggy hookup and a back door raid better than anything before in my whole life. I came into her, groaning like a beast. Such a bang, such a seizure, such a liberation. The garage door opened just when I was making up my suit. My wife was asking help with the bags.
All of a sudden I realized she wasn’t there anymore. I came out from the trance like if someone punched my stomach. My heart was pounding wildly, my face felt feverish, and my clothes were wet. I filled a jar with water and I smashed it against the tiles, trying to arrange a plausible scenario to justify my messy looks. My wife didn’t notice the tiny footsteps, but she found a bra on one of the deckchairs by the pool and nail tracks in my back a few hours later.
I am sleeping on the couch and she is giving me a silent treatment, while she decides if I deserve to be forgiven or not. And if you ask me if I deserve, I say I don’t.
But I can’t take her wet, tiny, juicy body off my mind. I can’t think about anything else.
It’s killing me.
May love take your eyes by storm
I love her more than I love photography.
I’m not composing a visual memoir of our relationship.
I refuse to get personal here. Your gaze is up to you.
I walk by her side, sometimes delaying my steps to fall behind, just to gain a better perspective of her tender, absent minded and quiet beauty.
If Internet didn’t exist, these shots would be in a shoe box for my secret and private solace.
She appeared into my life when I was totally lacking the hundred layers of protection that had cushioned my soul for decades and since then, every photo is a long kiss behind the curtain.
We walk the dog together as John and Yoko laid in the white bed and you see what your memory tells you to see: your own unedited feeling of passion.
Look alike
There’s a photograph of a young Doris Lessing sitting on the edge of a bed with white sheets. She is smoking, smiling, looking towards the lens as if she loved the photographer.
The light of the morning is coming from her left side. Wavy bangs and a soft v-neck pullover frame her features in a way one immediately falls into her: powerful, boundless, bottomless, mysterious.
D. is the most devoted reader of Lessing I know and I’ve just realized that both share the same photogenic singularities: sweet inquisitive gaze, a sun-welcoming skin, an uncalculated slouchiness, and the sophistication of not posing at all.
One firm spot on which to stand to move the earth
They teach me what I need to come fully alive and how to move from one moment to another as if life were a scavenger hunt.
They are also the center of gravity, the axis, the omphalos, the pivot, the transversal line that bind my worst fears: to lose them, to see them lost or hurt, to lose myself without having anchored and supplied their basic rights and needs.
Sometimes I get into some sort of inner do-or-die state of mind, a sudden divergence in my habitual style of slow cautious progress, and get antsy about shyness and this apparently natural inclination to underachievement, despite the flaming passion that drives me to photography.
It’s a wild, ambitious, greedy thing: I want a big house (for them to spend the weekends and holidays with me), I want to be famous and recognized as an artist (for them to be proud of me), I want to buy expensive things (for them to feel special), and I’m ashamed of my banal desires all at once. I’m all hollow scared of whatever the wire pulling that might may make them feel fatherless, insecure or unsupported, but also to neglect the artistic values I go after and I’m trying to be loyal as a legacy.
I take the train and travel a great deal of miles every Friday so I can give them the only richness I can offer now: my love, my physical presence, my voice soothing their growing pains and angst, and then I travel or drive back to arrive on time, have a shower and go to work, utterly exhausted.
What does it take to be seen as the only thing you can be and to earn money doing the only thing you love to do in the world? It depends so much on other people’s perception and priorities. Should I sacrifice my vocational dictum to get that money? What would I be teaching them, if so?
Most of the things beautiful and valuable and the people I couldn’t live without, I found during times and situations that demanded a lot from me or pushed me on and over this comfort zone of mine that I seldom probe. But the greatest values and lessons put before me (truth, trust, patience, surrender, love, integrity to face what I am and what I want, standing up for it even if it annoys other people and baffles my ‘likeability’) have arised from struggle and discomfort.
Robert Frost wrote that he had been through a long standing lover quarrel with life.
Maybe I can’t give my girls all the amenities that money can give (yet), but I can be an advocate of their blooming affair with upcoming opportunities and travel a ridiculous batch of miles just to hearten their beauty and breath in the audacious wisdom of their untouched instinct, and to bed cover them before sleep, in such a deep gratitude for their teaching and their existence, which is my most powerful source of motivation so far.
Maybe in the future they can read these lines and find in them the proof of their preciousness, that firm spot on which I stand to move the earth.