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
Covenants for the New Order
If I had charted the map of life before my forty somethings I would have placed quiet waters and true love in the far side of virgin territories.
As she appeared, all the things that I had been bereaved of found name and definition, as well as a bunch of minor neurosis that serve the purpose of holding reality tight and manageable.
Photography is some kind of portable memory device, but also an organic extension of desire, endearment and anxiety.
In one scene of Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, the character played by Samantha Morton opens a photo album, which holds the most precious moments of her life, the laughter of her lost parents, the enlightened eyes of the ones she gave smuggled ‘papers’ – sort of thumb sized chipsets granting freedom in a futuristic hyper-controlled world-, risking her own life. She says: Their faces are so beautiful, their eyes, their facial expressions’ and touches the album delighted in the warmly- embracing halo of past gone.
The album was not a video album, but an ordinary one, able to enhance the triggering of powerful emotional accounts. It was a tiny, thin album, compact and abridged. A summary of joy and feelings worthwhile remembering.
Sooner or later we will reach a tipping point, a harshly controlled global status. Emotions will be replaced with rules and the supreme act of rebellion will be to express love, intense convictions and feelings. We are doomed, we are playing with fire and numbing ourselves in order to avoid the responsibility that comes along with freedom. Huxley’s Brave New World, The Sphynx and Gattaca are not that implausible.
When those cold and unfeeling times arrive, my dynamic photo album will store a few photos of my daughters while they were discovering life, Delia’s feet dancing in quiet, peaceful waters and one of my young, bewildered and be-good-enough years. My girls’ photos to stay alive, my own portrait to remember I can survive.
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.
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.
Excuses
The older I get, the more I realize that we only accept what we think we deserve, we only do what we can -and want- to do, and procrastinate what we can put off until we can no longer accept what we get from others, until we proclaim we deserve more and better, until we positively know that there’s no more time to lose, that things delayed won’t be easier later, that happiness is a choice and morality often a disguise for cowardice or listlessness.
If there’s a deed or a need, there’s a way.
Thunder and shadow
I’m suddenly aware of my true artistic purpose: to survive the temptations of the past opening up in blatant integrity. The yes, the no, the not yet are still very challenging as my nature is a paradox of mental impatience coupled with a physical lack of verve. But everything moves at such high speed, and the moment fades as fast as my camera’s shutter so I have no time for defending old beliefs and assumptions. What comes up to my eye is reckless, and sometimes offensively bold, but if I censor the input or pay too much attention to the detail, if I black out in allegiance, trying to appear perfect, trying to get public attention, I become part of the majority that loses the day and closes the window to the wondrous failure that art is, that love is, that life is.
Despite the collateral damage, I was able enough to bounce, to take the leap, to bear off from the death house and wave my flag of rebellion from the distance. I’m still awfully scared, but I’ve never felt so mindful, so willing to put up with the truth of what is at hand. Faithfully, precisely, immediate and even religiously. So ready to conjure reality in it’s wholeness: thunder and shadow.
Beauty for granted
“Ahora tú, no dejes de hablar”
Some people wagered his name for years in betting pools of early evanescence, but a couple of weeks ago, he sort it out the best he could to sing La chica de ayer in a crappy and mawkish TV show called The battle of the decades. After the song, almost breathless, visibly weak and ready to drop, he answered a hollow question of the host about why should the 80’s had to win over the 50’s.
That was his last public appearance.
Watching the video I see Anabel, one of the eliminated contestants of the last edition of OT (a kind of cross between Pop Idol and Big Brother), visibly touched by his performance and his frailty.
It’s almost an oxymoron to see Antonio in that context, the heartbreaking afterglow of his talent in such a splurge of mediocrity. However, Anabel’s expression was surprisingly honest and maybe for the first time, I found in her something worthwhile to look at. Perhaps it was not her merit, but his shy and wounded gift.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things and he had the outstanding capacity to bring that love to the surface through his compositions and his presence.
One cannot run away from weakness. It’s all about fighting it out or perishing and he was a light flyweight warrior of his own brittleness, yet always ready to let the blaze unfold.
I read somewhere that grace comes often clad in the dusky robe of desolation and in this case it’s true without question and beyond doubt. He struggled inner demons and he had a great craving for ingravity, but he wasn’t as sad as we imagined him to be. He wanted to have a child, he was about publishing a book of poems, he was excited about his new album, and even though his body was running away through the back stairs, he didn’t want to die and he didn’t mention death in any of his songs.
I’m afraid that whatever I write about him in the aftermath of his departure, will result in a platitude.
The truth is that his two guitars were close to the coffin, available to whoever wanted to say good bye with a few accords but no one had the guts to do so, as if the only acceptable eulogy was silence.
We owe him more sweetness and kindness than we are able to pay.
The biggest curse of our times is to take beauty for granted until it’s irrevocably lost.