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.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Happy together
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.
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.
On photography and other dangerous pursuits
Even though some days life is a shit storm and most of things wet paper, I consider myself one of the richest and more fortunate human beings in the world.
Wonder is leading and I’m in the good direction.
The click must go on.
Transilience
How did so many people walk away from the casualty with barely a scratch?
Who of them was the angel?
Sheep behavior
Stupid behavior is domain-dependent and a puzzling paradox: one can be a genius in a given area and act like a natural-born fool, a jerk, a moron or a cretine in another.
But sheep behavior is even more a mystery: the crowd buying in the same things, the same myths, the same lies, the same political ideas, the same religion. The crowd going to the same places, expecting the same unrealistic things, watching the same cretinous reality shows and acclaiming the same mediocre, insipid and artless idols just to go on belonging to the disquieted majority as it were a merit of some kind, a contest of purposeless renunciation, the Herculean harvest of an inexistent self. The crowd picking Paris Hilton or Chiki Chiki as buffoons and role models or making Antonio Vega a posthumous best selling just because he is now dead.