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.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
On releasing the burden
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.
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.
Agent of death
It was a case of posthumous revelation.
The man was standing by her side, holding the camera with his beautiful hands, waiting for an omen, waiting for the air to move the undergrowth and the leaves, waiting for a slight change in the light, waiting to hear his own voice whispering now, totally unaware of her proximity.
She touched his coat, and his hair, wondering how warmly and slowly those hands could travel across the delicate creases of her silken dress.
He ducked to the uneven and mossy ground, trying to put all the pieces of the gravestone together.
Confused, perplexed, she read her own name, slowly, voicelessly moving her pale and deaf lips.
The man took five photographs. Four of them were trashed. He only kept the one that rendered her whole life a mystery.