After the battles in the winter front, his great grandmother took the clothes of fresh killed corpses to protect her left children from the south-west wind and keep them warm and free from pneumonia. Her husband didn’t come back from the ranks, and two of the kids had already died as a result of hunger and cold. She was determined to keep the rest alive, even if she had to walk between a field of cadavers, and dress the children with six sizes bigger blood stained clothes and leave those poor men naked under the snow fall, and see them turning blue, then completely white and dream of them every single night, and wake up as a dead asleep herself, to gather weeds to throw into the pot. One night she considered going further, and cutting off the flesh of a thigh, ready and willing to accept condemnation for such a profanity. In that moment, the missing husband appeared through the door, rawboned, gaunt, with his sad empty eyes telling horror stories, and that arrival kept her from more battleground incursions.
They cried in silence and only talked about the children’s decease.
Next morning, everyone had a breakfast of chocolate bars he had been saving in his backpack along six months of bare subsistence.
Decades later, in the family house there must be bread and chocolate and new clothes in the wardrobes, and it’s considered unkind and of bad taste to ask about war times.
All the children are happy and obsessively well fed.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Snow and chocolate
Happy together
He is with her because she is the perfect bonus to the car. The ultimate tuning ornament.
She is with him because the car is the perfect complement to her sculpted body.
There’s no love in their agreement. No need of mutual affection or bounden duty.
He works in his car as an extension of himself, because he can’t repair or embellish a battered childhood.
She works in her body through expensive surgery and personal trainers to heal the lousy self concept of a sexually abused child.
None of them can articulate words to tell the story and break through the pains of memory, so they reinvent identity detail by detail, again and again, in cool and narcissistic company.
Therapy is too long and burdensome.
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.
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.
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.
Sheep behavior
Stupid behavior is domain-dependent and a puzzling paradox: one can be a genius in a given area and act like a natural-born fool, a jerk, a moron or a cretine in another.
But sheep behavior is even more a mystery: the crowd buying in the same things, the same myths, the same lies, the same political ideas, the same religion. The crowd going to the same places, expecting the same unrealistic things, watching the same cretinous reality shows and acclaiming the same mediocre, insipid and artless idols just to go on belonging to the disquieted majority as it were a merit of some kind, a contest of purposeless renunciation, the Herculean harvest of an inexistent self. The crowd picking Paris Hilton or Chiki Chiki as buffoons and role models or making Antonio Vega a posthumous best selling just because he is now dead.
Playground reality show
On the second day of the pre-school year he was confronted with the perplexity of his own bloodlessness and vulnerability. “Nobody is all-powerful, you better learn to fight your own battles” was the only comfort he received at home when arriving with a purple eye and a blood stained jumper.
Six months later, the muddle of all fears had evolved in an almost obsessive commitment to survival. And it was all about that: being the strongest in the playground and the one destroying rivals at any means.
At ten he attempted rape over an older girl and things have only degenerated since his first real sociopathic endeavor.
Now tell me about the making of Attila the Hun: was it lack of love or too much television?
A struggle against conformity
It amazes me how the fragments of the moment always manage to fit together in spite of all the defective maneuvers and devices of the mind to impose a Procrustean strict conformity to what we are supposed to see and feel.
Meaning appears beyond the image, fading as we attempt to state it as if reality had a defense mechanism of its own.
The two girls with hair extensions, heavy makeup and deep racks passed by the boy without noticing him.
I shot the camera from intuition and even though I can’t remember what I was thinking at the time the shutter was released, I can easily relate to the boy’s gawk: we can only see what we already believe and perpetuate the rule in order to shrink the anxiety associated with desire and to avoid the emotional insulation resulting from rejection.
Robert Doisneau wrote that one’s got to struggle against the pollution of intelligence in order to become an animal with very sharp instincts – a sort of intuitive medium – so that to photograph becomes a magical act, and slowly other more suggestive images begin to appear behind the visible image, for which the photographer cannot be held responsible.
Maybe none of the girls were worthwhile looking at (dull, average, unexceptional), but at this moment, the boy’s glance yields a return: a foreknowing vision beyond them.