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.
Published on julio 24, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Record, Street Tags: all about me, anima mia, blemished, revelations
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.
Published on julio 20, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Camera, Remix, Start shooting Tags: anima mia, Camera, Seek for admiration, Who are you?
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.
Published on julio 13, 2009 7:10 am.
Filed under: Departure of reality, Victim of a foolish heart Tags: all about me, anima mia, revelations
“Who the fuck are you calling a failure?”
The verbal lash hastily hit me down to the core, while waiting for my beer at the counter of a tavern, after doing some errands.
We all keep one or two alternative selves carefully hidden, and most of the time they faithfully assume the burden of our forbidden desires, our shameful secrets, our bitter regrets. But sometimes, when defenses are weak, or the body is tired, they turn anarch and claim their rights and unmet needs.
All of a sudden, one clearly can hear their voices, and sense their anger, and notice the power that dark emotions hold, and the only mentally sound choice is to remain immobile, passive, almost vegetative, until the uprising cools down.
Enraged intentions go away one sip of beer at a time. You pick yourself together, pay the tapas, fix the discreet smile, the good guy looks, and walk away counting the paving stones. It’s just a flare-up, the beastly attempt of truth to reset its order. As it comes, as it goes.
The annoying telephone operator will spend two hours talking in circles before restoring your connection, and you’ll be affable, polite, complaisant, as if she saved your life. And the bipartisan, the angry one, the deprived will blow the coals inwards and ask for antacids. You probably saw this thing on television, The United States of Tara. Taking the others out regularly would provide great relief, but we live in the land of hypocrisy. Airs and graces, affectation, double-dealing, lip service, double-dealing and falseheartedness. For the common good.
There’s a cafe where you get discounts for the most offensive insult. No wonder plots relish on madness.
Published on julio 3, 2009 7:23 am.
Filed under: Departure of reality Tags: anima mia, Seek for admiration
I love her more than I love photography.
I’m not composing a visual memoir of our relationship.
I refuse to get personal here. Your gaze is up to you.
I walk by her side, sometimes delaying my steps to fall behind, just to gain a better perspective of her tender, absent minded and quiet beauty.
If Internet didn’t exist, these shots would be in a shoe box for my secret and private solace.
She appeared into my life when I was totally lacking the hundred layers of protection that had cushioned my soul for decades and since then, every photo is a long kiss behind the curtain.
We walk the dog together as John and Yoko laid in the white bed and you see what your memory tells you to see: your own unedited feeling of passion.
Published on junio 26, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Sense, Street, Victim of a foolish heart Tags: all about me, anima mia, D
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.
Published on junio 22, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Sense Tags: all about me, anima mia, Camera, cartography
They teach me what I need to come fully alive and how to move from one moment to another as if life were a scavenger hunt.
They are also the center of gravity, the axis, the omphalos, the pivot, the transversal line that bind my worst fears: to lose them, to see them lost or hurt, to lose myself without having anchored and supplied their basic rights and needs.
Sometimes I get into some sort of inner do-or-die state of mind, a sudden divergence in my habitual style of slow cautious progress, and get antsy about shyness and this apparently natural inclination to underachievement, despite the flaming passion that drives me to photography.
It’s a wild, ambitious, greedy thing: I want a big house (for them to spend the weekends and holidays with me), I want to be famous and recognized as an artist (for them to be proud of me), I want to buy expensive things (for them to feel special), and I’m ashamed of my banal desires all at once. I’m all hollow scared of whatever the wire pulling that might may make them feel fatherless, insecure or unsupported, but also to neglect the artistic values I go after and I’m trying to be loyal as a legacy.
I take the train and travel a great deal of miles every Friday so I can give them the only richness I can offer now: my love, my physical presence, my voice soothing their growing pains and angst, and then I travel or drive back to arrive on time, have a shower and go to work, utterly exhausted.
What does it take to be seen as the only thing you can be and to earn money doing the only thing you love to do in the world? It depends so much on other people’s perception and priorities. Should I sacrifice my vocational dictum to get that money? What would I be teaching them, if so?
Most of the things beautiful and valuable and the people I couldn’t live without, I found during times and situations that demanded a lot from me or pushed me on and over this comfort zone of mine that I seldom probe. But the greatest values and lessons put before me (truth, trust, patience, surrender, love, integrity to face what I am and what I want, standing up for it even if it annoys other people and baffles my ‘likeability’) have arised from struggle and discomfort.
Robert Frost wrote that he had been through a long standing lover quarrel with life.
Maybe I can’t give my girls all the amenities that money can give (yet), but I can be an advocate of their blooming affair with upcoming opportunities and travel a ridiculous batch of miles just to hearten their beauty and breath in the audacious wisdom of their untouched instinct, and to bed cover them before sleep, in such a deep gratitude for their teaching and their existence, which is my most powerful source of motivation so far.
Maybe in the future they can read these lines and find in them the proof of their preciousness, that firm spot on which I stand to move the earth.
Published on junio 11, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Sense Tags: anima mia, My amazing girls, revelations
This light shining through my flesh upon things on to the ground. This light that I can barely name. This life belt, this umbilical cord, this secular appearance of a revenant God, this momentary oblivion of me.
Published on mayo 18, 2009 7:00 am.
Filed under: Departure of reality, Record Tags: anima mia, Anyone can do it, revelations
