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
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.
In a dark time, the eye begins to see (*)
As a photographer, I’ve come to realize that certain emotions are invisible to eyes in immediate reality, but they appear, so uncanny familiar, so violent, so touching, once revealed in a photograph. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be if I couldn’t keep record of the overlooked, if I couldn’t stay a minute mindfully, compassionately connected with all the disowned selves of mine that show up in brief encounters, in relationships of no more than half of a minute.
What would my life be like if I couldn’t touch the spent threads of the past interweaved in the silken clothes of present. What kind of person would I be, unaware of the subtle evidence of human suffering meeting me at the borders of a shot?
Photography lets me feel the chill of winter on the skin and in the soul of strangers, and gives me a glimpse of their lives as a whole. It makes me aware and pushes me through the thickness of thought, more open, more available, much more tender and humble. And most of all, more careful and insightful, both qualities without which no photographer can evolve to what others call genius, and I suspect it’s the consistent choice to follow inner truth and inner knowingness, wherever they take us, whatever the moment we are meant to freeze so others can seize what really happens, what really happened and even foretell what is about to happen, beyond any attempt of self-definition.
(*) Quote by Theodore Roethke.
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.
Close enough
I humbly and faithfully cherish a lodge of mentors, most of them gone: the tutelary spirits of photography. One of the members of this lodge is Robert Capa, who said that if a photo is mediocre or lifeless, you weren’t close enough. That’s the reason why I often cross the same line that cross stalkers, voyeurs and exhibitionists.
I’m a shy, discreet man, but the need to capture life naked and off guard gives me the arrogance, the boldness, the immodesty necessary to do my best with the only precious talent I think I’ve got.
Bilateral symmetry
When sorting material I can notice a persistent pattern of polarities.
A photo is either accidental or incidental, Kairos (the perfect moment portrayed) or Kairos not (something is missing or absent, the sensation of incompleteness). Connected to the subject, eye-to-eye gazing, posing, spontaneous adjustment to the context or aware of a subject unaware of the camera. Witnessing a feeling, an emotional quality from a distance or being one with the feeling, as a symbolic reflection of what’s going in my life at the moment. Poignant or just ankle-deep. Intimate or anthropological. Testimonial or augury. Cast off of possessed. Ungraspable or bond. Carnal or sacred. Question or answer. Vague or categorical. Push or pull.
And beyond the tension between polarities, there is the silent dialogue, the closeness, the yearning that brings eye and the beauty of what is seen together as one. The whirlpool of mysterious attraction. The thrill of the ride, the pansexual flinch of unpronounced language. The rush to touch and embrace. Under full spectrum light, the appeal of darkness.
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.
Stieglitz
At the beginning, Alfred Stieglitz thoroughly manipulated his photographs to imitate paintings. Later, he dismantled any remains of pictorial rules and committed to straight photography: little or no cropping, retouching or artificial alteration. This giant leap gave it the dignity and sovereignty of an art of its own.
His work doesn’t age nor die. Like good novels and classic films it survives any preposterous definition of the critics, any comparison, any classification that comes in its way.
A straightforward, honest, stripped bare observation and humble recording of the moment is a landslide victory over impermanence. Even death symbols should bring to mind the silence of no judgment, the raw awareness of the unspeakable.