The girl with the dark glasses doesn’t know she is a swine flu carrier.
The older woman with the white bag standing behind her is the mother of the emergency room doctor that is going to diagnose her tomorrow.
The absent minded boy with a hand in his pocket is going to fall in love with the Peruvian girl that works in the bakery along with the man walking towards him across the street.
The black urban surfer with the black bag was once helped by a volunteer when he arrived to the coast of Cadiz in a patera, and the volunteer happens to be the father of the girl in white boots by his side.
The boy and the woman to the right of the photograph have stolen food at the supermarket where the girl with dark glasses works as a cashier.
The doctor in the emergency room still dreams about melting beneath the hands of the girl in white boots, who works as a masseur in a gym.
We all fit together in the endless slideshow of the One who will never let go anything unseen.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Six degrees of separation (Take One)
Disjuncture
We don’t live in the land of plenty any more.
I turn on the television and see the queues of the unemployed.
Every few days people close to us are fired from their jobs.
I’m dissolving throughout urban wandering. A moment at a time, a shot at a time is all I can manage. The feeling that whatever I portrait turns to be unreliable haunts me, leaves me at the periphery, no matter the aesthetic prism I filter the raw material throughout, no matter my good intentions.
Most of the days, I sort the pictures trying to assemble a coherent whole, and can’t pick enough of them to tell a story, but I stubbornly try, although knowing that most of them are too private, that they spare the viewer nothing, that I shouldn’t have shown the poignant truth of human despair. It reminds me Buenos Aires in the time of the corralito: sleepwalkers, men and women with sad and worried sick eyes, pedestrians prowling around the trash containers, skinny dogs.
Then I go to Annie Leibovitz’s photo call, and I find all this much-a-do-about-nothing about her private exhibition (Susan Sontag dying, father dying, late pregnancy, domestic snapshots of questionable intimacy and artistic value), perhaps a bit fatuous and flat in a time that claims for the dignity and sobriety of Dorothea Lange’s style of work.
I can’t help asking myself what would Susan think of this baloney if she were among us.
Artifice
The movie takes place over a single day. From the very first moment you know that you are about to be the witness of an imminent downfall. Both want to be loved, or maybe it’s all about the contrary.
‘What the fuck’, he says in one of the first scenes. ‘Without you, mine would be a life of absolute misery’. Then he points a loaded gun to his own head, trying to make her change her mind. But she doesn’t. It scares the shit out of you, it seems so real.
The girl walks towards the guy, as if going barefoot across a death defying tightrope. She gives him a knife and says ‘go ahead’. He takes the knife but does nothing.
I think ‘It takes balls to document the end of an affair with a steadycam’.
It is supposed to be autobiographical so you stay there, stuck to the theater stall, expecting something gruesome to happen as the girl was stabbed in a motel two years ago. You wonder if it’s all true, some kinda snuff, some kinda psychological violence like Albee’s.
Try to stop seeing, if you can. That’s the texture of morbid vérité.
And in the midst of that high impact dramatic climax, the girl starts talking about a fantasy she has with fucking machines. People roar with laughter.
No blood, no anything. An hour and a half of shadows and a voice-over.
I’ll tell you something, man: owning a camera doesn’t make your freaking movie worth viewing.
Look alike
There’s a photograph of a young Doris Lessing sitting on the edge of a bed with white sheets. She is smoking, smiling, looking towards the lens as if she loved the photographer.
The light of the morning is coming from her left side. Wavy bangs and a soft v-neck pullover frame her features in a way one immediately falls into her: powerful, boundless, bottomless, mysterious.
D. is the most devoted reader of Lessing I know and I’ve just realized that both share the same photogenic singularities: sweet inquisitive gaze, a sun-welcoming skin, an uncalculated slouchiness, and the sophistication of not posing at all.
Guinea Pig
The goal was to create emotions in the game, the ultimate ludicrous experience and she was one of the human subjects of the control experiment.
The first check was spent at Zara and the second at a Mac Store.
She only had to play two hours a day non stop in a lab, to report any changes in perception or behavior and to keep the secret, obviously.
The game slightly reminded her of Second Life or The Sims, but in just a minute of play she was rushed into her childhood or her teens, and an impolite, blatant alternative self had taken over the control of everything, making brutal amends or satisfying forbidden desires and needs.
On the other side, just out of the screen, reality warped totally out of proportion and she loved that.
She loved the universal permission to freak out in a borderline way, her bizarre, nameless hunger left out like a wild beast, the tingling flood of happenstance kicking inside her central nervous system. After a few weeks she had turned into a female version of House M.D. Ill-mannered, brutally honest, witty, disrespectful, brilliant.
Things started to go awry. At this point, she was having atrocious fantasies I can’t even describe in these pages, even though she was still able to constrain ill drives and maintain a sense of reality.
Now, in the aftermath of her suicide, her latest battered boyfriend is trying to sell the exclusive of her diaries to the tabloids and the white-robe men in the lab have sent their bullyboys to get rid of the problem.
Figure that.
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.
Art and Intimacy
As knowledge is born from the desire to know, vision is born from the desire to see.
Art is the drive to share both, knowledge and vision.
Every artist is dancing naked in the dark, drunk with anticipation, taking risks into the unknown and the impossible, so the audience can confirm or argue down their understanding of what is real and find solace in the certainness of transcendence.
Time is humbled through art. Artists are the warriors of all things impermanent and eventually, they give us a focus, a notion of mystery, always available for an intimate dialogue.
In our times, the dominant misunderstanding between the artist and the audience is all the media-noise telling us where to look and what to see, wrecking any possibility of real awakening or awareness, establishing the rules in behalf of marketing.
Media-feeding can provide images and concepts, but cannot substitute the feeling of true initiation or satisfy our original, untouched and ever new desire for authenticity. And what is worse: it numbs our awareness, it snaps us out of truth, and makes us forget those who bet the bushes in the jungle of meaning only to carve the maps of this brave new world.
The whisperer
Like a hunter, patiently awaiting for its prey, Carla spent fifteen years for him to exhaust his energy, his sexual drive, his hunger for all things expensive and exciting, his eleventh lover, his eleventh breakup, and finally, when he had been fired and gone through full-blown bankruptcy, and was bleeding from a coke-hole in his nasal septum, she approached him in the street, not far away from his attic and said hello.
Power driven men are the easiest to blackmail and put into trance.
Certainly, he didn’t care she was a little plump, he didn’t notice that she wasn’t his type of girl.
He couldn’t think about anything but their advantageous encounter and he couldn’t remember anything but that night she whispered him out from fear in the summer camp.
They spent the evening making an inventory of the last decade.
They moved together three weeks later.
He is dogmatic about the blessing that was to find his first love.
Don’t even try to change his mind about Carla. He will fire you.