No matter how much moles think they understand the land they dig, the alluvium will never understand moles and most of the times, the tunnels are lost or clogged up . However, the mole will persist in its blind and stubborn plan to dig as far as possible, with tireless and unshakeable determination.
A mole’s tenacity is one of the most amazing qualities to adopt. It can literally make golf course caretakers go mad and force them to take extreme measures in order to exterminate them.
This quality is not based on belief, but on instinct.
When did us, humans, forget to get attuned to this drive, this incredible sense of what has to be done, here, now? No procrastination, no hesitation. Just digging.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
The digger
North Pole
She was standing there, just as in North Pole.
Whatever the direction we took from that point, it was South.
Civil disorder
Watermelon hopelessly waited for execution.
Tomatoes, in total observance and acquiescence to the Lawful Authority, piled up in the bucket to prevent and suffocate any sign of insurgency and uprising.
But Green Pepper began to doubt the righteous and blameless power of the oppressor and outtalked Small Sissy Green Pepper to turn the Pink Tower upside down, yelling ‘Freedom! Equality! Brotherhood!’
There was copious red spill and smashed seeds on the paving stone and in its fast way street across, Watermelon tasted the brief magnificence of seven seconds of bounty, before cracking up against the water font.
No one honored the heroes. Both ended in the frying pan.
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.
The escort
She had a deep longing for someone who didn’t want to change her habits, thoughts or looks. She was done with an authoritarian father, bossy lovers, macho managers and contemptuous therapists.
After a decade of serial dating, she picked up the phone and officially became a regular escort client.
At some point as grown up, a woman may find great relief in the integrity of her bliss, and stop asking for permission or absolution for what she really wants.
Most of her girlfriends are jealous and they comment upon her behavior when she’s not present.
She is not that old to pay for company, and she is sexy, more than the average. Why should she get a gigolo, then?
There’s a certain body language indicative of discomfort or boredom in a man.
I’m a photographer. My job is to read other’s minds through their gestures.
Believe me. The guy was at home with her.
She sucked on a chupachups while paying absorbed attention to the races.
He was leaning his chest on her back, softly holding her hips.
I imagined that perfect red manicure running on his chiseled rear delts or pecs.
The portrait of perfect love.
Playing the cast
Despite my attempts to stay back, playing invisibility, some people still break the delicate balance between the image and the event, striking the pose, bringing to play all their complexes and identity struggles. While editing, I often find that they were showing off my own disowned shadows, my conflicts as an artist. But there’s a gift in random accident: the realization that no photography has a chance of getting close to perfection unless letting that script be gone, unless letting the fakery, the posing, the seduction of the model render it’s personal language. Like in a well rehearsed dance.
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.
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.