Fierce beauties, red kiss, drunk nights of weirdness and enchantment, a ticket to Wonderland from time to time, cabaret romance, nostalgic longing in foreign eyes, death defying nihilists dancing with a fag between their fingers, entitled gothic dominatrix, and lick-shoe submissive big boys with
ducktail hair style, a troupe of crepuscular creatures, a blank memory card, Delia’s warmth in bed at dawn when coming home, the smiling faces of my daughters right before passing out without brushing my teeth. These are what I stay alive for.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Red kiss
Spider and I (take two)
In the messy and mirrorless warehouse serving as a dressing room, the goddess enhances her bangs brushing thin locks of dyed hair and shaking a funky bottle of Chinese hairspray, frostily ignoring my presence while I find an angle for the shot.
She sits straight and proud on a chair way smaller than her broad fanny. The bosom is overpouring a black satin corset that somehow shapes an inexistent waistline.
Now that she isn’t exactly posing, I am able to appreciate the appeal of her face, the grounded, arrogant, perky and Beth Ditto-like attitude.
The vanished owner of the shoes comes to my mind. I imagine his hands lost in such abundance, his lips kissing the point end of her boots and the stilettos scratching his back.
And suddenly, I also see them both, naked from these costumes, in native buff, all the flesh blissfully delivered from playing the part and from the glossy tight fabrics, eating pizza and watching television on a wide bed, cuddling, smiling, vulnerable, with no need or urge to prove nothing or to make any virtue of their flaws. And I feel close, and warmhearted for a moment, until she gets up, looking at me, entitled to submissive reverence.
On releasing the burden
Una de prueba
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.
Chasing the stallions of ennui
Some people seem to be just a space of resonance. The aimless, dismal and wild stallions of Ennui. The camera is drawn to them as to the void. There’s music surrounding the dreamy and self- absorbed dance, but as it touches the skin, the thoroughly sculpted hair, it blows up into quiet pieces and the atmosphere resembles the delirious, hot and touch-needy effect of doing ecstasy. I move around, holding the camera with a quavering hand and a tall glass of spirits in the other one. I need to go to the rest room, but it’s crowded with gothic girls making over their makeups, dudes in amorous dalliance against the walls or snorting coke like crazy. The three endeavors are done with bizarre nerve and sinew, so I decide to wait, acting considerate and discreet as always, if holding the need to pee, a glass and a camera at the same time can be considered considerate and discreet at all. The scenario is stirring, and arousing, the guy with the white rolled up sleeves is now smoking a cigarette, but he has not stopped dancing to light it and the sparkles spread through the solid air. If I didn’t give up smoking, I would ask him for one, or to share it with me, but I prefer watching the trance from the edges than letting myself drown in evanescence to the hilt.
Erebus
Marshall Mc Luhan said that historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our times are the richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.
He forgot to mention night dens, freak ghettos, uptown districts, where ageless, disturbed and disturbing creatures seem to be the same ones that inhabited caverns of iniquity in early Las Vegas or García Alix’s photos during the reckless years of La Movida.
They love posing, they smell of opium smoke and incense, they shamelessly show up their histrionic brilliance, they calculate my poundage in blood, and hold my stare as I hide behind the camera, drunk and happy as ever.
By this river
We are so used to notice things in a numb trance, in order to save every slice and every morsel of life for later, that only when faced to a great deal of loss, tragedy, turmoil, fear and misadventure, totally crack-open we allow ourselves to feel, and to love and to mourn, and even to take a path of our choice and making. Jumping into the void, leaping, fearless.
When reality swings us down over the edge, we aknowledge the wild nature of our hearts, the preciousness of the moment, the value of each one of our encounters with the rest of us, the throbbing light of pain and pleasure, as still and silent in a black and white portrait.
Imagine what would be the story of you if all that could be rescued from a fire in your house was a small document photo of someone you loved dearly. Imagine that such a tiny, almost unsubstantial memento is the only thing you can hold on to for the rest of existence.
After imagining all your possessions absent, devastated, doomed, irretrievable, irreparable and gone, open your eyes to the wonder of now, and realize that it’s shaping the place where you belong, by this river. So instead of chasing happiness, remember it’s about just embracing everybody else in awe and gratitude, because joy doesn’t know the meaning of tomorrow.
Atonement
Her silhouette reveals as emerging from the totally black canvas of the cabaret.
Small tight feet in kinky boots, sexy pin-up fish net stockings, velvet garter, unbelievable prude bitsy hands keeping the gates of the land of promise.
I’m not sure if I like her. The energy of the shooting comes more from morbid curiosity than from true sympathy. The camera seems pulled to the orphan male shoes by the disturbance and the bewilderment of an absence. I stop looking at her face, benumbed, careless, insensitive and start wondering about the man, entangled and later devoured by black widow.
It was not my eye that beheaded the goddess, but the camera’s.
Oh, the forbidden pleasures of symbolic revenge.
Lovely bestiary
“‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
‘Oh, you ca’n’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’”
Lewis Carroll
Alice in Wonderland
There I am, slightly drunk and gripped by the lovely bestiary collected in the memory card. There I am, mesmerized by three beauty spots under the small boobs of the Red Queen. I wonder how the fluffy soutien stays in it’s place, but most of all I notice deep sadness or melancholy in her eyes, some kind of homesickness, some kind of saudade. And I want to hold her in my arms and say that everything is gonna be alright, but all I can do is rehearse a smile at her Ooops and be grateful to photography for providing me the endless occasion for human closeness, and for this night, for these gurus in how to take myself more lightly, the master class in the admiration of diversity. And most of all, for the ultimate sentimental reminder: sometimes we are the only thing that other stranded person has in a given moment.