La fotografía es el arte de la pobreza.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Psychology of mass murder
Keep the gun in the bag. Sit down there and wait. Take a mental account of humilliations.
Remember the time she laughed at your face. Remember the time the russian doll faked it and then said while putting her bra on: you have plenty of time to make it grow thick and hard.
Think of all that people looking at you from the privileged stance. Think of the taste of being dumped. Feed your resentment as you would feed a wild animal in a cage. Let your anger set off slowly.
Plan everything about the killings. Imagine yourself taking out the gun and killing as many people as possible in the least time. Stockpile ammunition. Let the sense of failure creep up and blow your mind. Make yourself a man through destruction.
Photographers and reporters will make you the whole focus of attention. You will always be remembered. Your face will be shown to the whole world with a soundtrack of sirens blaring.
They will give the killing massive coverage. The blood spilled and the body count will be the leading story of the season. Come on. Stand up. Load your gun. Choose your first target. Start shooting. Think of all those nerds deconstructing your background in lectures.
He was a lonely boy. His father was abusive. His mother was alcoholic. No one cared a dime.
Make this your turn. They will shoot anyway.
Dressing Tunick up (or how to make crazy money as a photographer)
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.
The eighty folds of oblivion
Who are you?
Where am I?
Don’t tell me I have the age I deserve.
I slowly crossed the street.
I slowly took the spoon to the mouth.
I wanted to be clean this morning.
I wanted fresh lavander water on my hair.
Who is that staring at me from the other side?
How did you get me to this noisy place?
Where do we come from?
What is your name?
I feel like drowning, so confused.
How is that thing called.
In his hands.
Take me home, I don’t want to be late.
You look familiar. What’s your name?
I can’t remember your name.
Don’t stare at me.
Where’s my soup?
What happened to the table?
Know where to stand
Ansel Adams made a photo of Mount Williamson (from Manzanar, California) liying on the top of his car, using a 19-inch lens on 8×10 film. The camera slightly pointed down. The position provided a wide overlook of the foreground. The light was literally washing over the whitened stones of the desert and the resulting shoot is a perfect portrait of inner silence.
No one can teach the eye to anticipate the emotion of the finished image. That’s what he called ‘departure of reality’.
Now we are the camera. We traded the sacred for the pixel. We trust the mesmerizing effect photographs have got over will and belief, we act as the numb members of a massive cult of disposable reality. We take instead of making. We gorge and feast, we binge, we hoard, we overexpose our reckless hunger of the visible and yet we remain consumed by the desire of what can’t be contained in words.
Brief bolts strucking the forest
The other girl survived the pact and I’m enraged. For a moment I wish her life to be taken, too.
I hate those parents counting the minutes behind the glass walls of the Intensive Care Unit.
I want them to mourn and grieve, I want their lives shattered like mine. I want the mechanical ventilator to stop. I want her breath to stop. Her heart to stop. Her life to stop.
As I watch the news coverage in the mute Tv set in the corner of the waiting room, I feel the guilt, the remorseful playback and a muddy river of useless questions crawling in my brain like worms in a tin can.
It was not my fault. I gave her everything she wanted, I gave her whatever she asked for. I worked sixteen hours a day for her to receive the most exquisite education.
I can’t let myself close the eyes. If I do, even for a moment, I see the policemen cutting the rope, taking her down from the tree just like Jesus was taken down from the cross on Virgin Mary’s lap. Not as sweetly, of course. Not as glamurously.
I could not shut my eyes then either. I was in total wonderment of the whole scene, as in a CSI episode. I could see the flash of cameras like brief bolts strucking across the forest, breaking the dawn’s dim ligh. I could see the paramedics rushing through the CPR, I could hear one of them saying “She’s back, let’s go”. I could feel my knees on the cold ground and the sudden rage pulling my body up and then that scream like a vomit through the cords of the throat, my own scream in that same forest we set our camping tents just before the divorce mixed with the feeling of my daughter’s body last seconds struggle to live.
It cannot be true she snorted neat lines of coke in the bathroom during playtime on a regular basis. It cannot be possible she snorted her pocket money away in powder for years. They tell me she has got a hole in her nose like long time junkies. They tell me that she logged a hundred times in an Internet suicide chatroom. It cannot be true. She was the best little girl in the world.
She must have been bullied extensively or something.