I have a real soft spot for some strangers that look straight into my eyes and cry for help without a word, without a tear, without stopping to say ‘hey, you, I’m completely lost and screwed up, let’s share a beer, come on, I’ll pay the drinks… Don’t know where to start, let’s say I’ve been fired from my job, some days I want to kill my wife and cut my children to pieces, but I’m a good guy, so I will probably shoot my head off with my brother’s gun.’
Neither of us stop, I go home as if someone had hit me with desperate eyes in the middle of the stomach and food tastes bitter and I somewhat pray for my work to be like one of those cardiopulmonary reanimation devices of emergency rooms and ambulances. One capable of shocking almost dead lives into hope or into wonder or into awareness or indignation or into sweetness, or into love, or into innocence or into each other. Again.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Heart is a weapon the size of a fist
Snow and chocolate
After the battles in the winter front, his great grandmother took the clothes of fresh killed corpses to protect her left children from the south-west wind and keep them warm and free from pneumonia. Her husband didn’t come back from the ranks, and two of the kids had already died as a result of hunger and cold. She was determined to keep the rest alive, even if she had to walk between a field of cadavers, and dress the children with six sizes bigger blood stained clothes and leave those poor men naked under the snow fall, and see them turning blue, then completely white and dream of them every single night, and wake up as a dead asleep herself, to gather weeds to throw into the pot. One night she considered going further, and cutting off the flesh of a thigh, ready and willing to accept condemnation for such a profanity. In that moment, the missing husband appeared through the door, rawboned, gaunt, with his sad empty eyes telling horror stories, and that arrival kept her from more battleground incursions.
They cried in silence and only talked about the children’s decease.
Next morning, everyone had a breakfast of chocolate bars he had been saving in his backpack along six months of bare subsistence.
Decades later, in the family house there must be bread and chocolate and new clothes in the wardrobes, and it’s considered unkind and of bad taste to ask about war times.
All the children are happy and obsessively well fed.
Close enough
I humbly and faithfully cherish a lodge of mentors, most of them gone: the tutelary spirits of photography. One of the members of this lodge is Robert Capa, who said that if a photo is mediocre or lifeless, you weren’t close enough. That’s the reason why I often cross the same line that cross stalkers, voyeurs and exhibitionists.
I’m a shy, discreet man, but the need to capture life naked and off guard gives me the arrogance, the boldness, the immodesty necessary to do my best with the only precious talent I think I’ve got.
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.
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.
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.
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.