Photography is my primary coping behavior.
I take photographs of what I’m scared to own, lose or let go of.
I take photographs of what I fear or secretly wish to become.
I take photographs of cyclical nightmares.
I wordlessly beg for a proof of my deserving.
I hide behind the focus like a shy actor on stage.
Photography has also become my universal prayer, the multiple portrait of my flaws, the endless list of my unmet needs.
Photography makes me invisible so I can finally become visible in a figurative sense.
I get a grip on light so I can explain shadows.
Photography is for me the weird experience of being born, falling in love, falling out of love and then dying in one hundredth of a second.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Stripping naked at the gates of Assisi
Plate tectonics
Most of the people and things I love to the bones were beautiful, bountiful accidents at the very beginning. It would be risky to abridge memory without blotting out the essential. The true relationship between cause and effect is largelly concealed to the conscious mind.
My heart is the ball losing momentum before choosing black or red, odd or even and then falling on to the wheel. They used to sell cameras saying you press the button and we do the rest.
It never was that easy. The whole process takes so much responsibility that I fluctuate between elation and an overwhelming sense of failure from one click to the next.
Some days she arrives home from work totally worn-out. She barely drinks a glass of hot milk and passes away, chronically sleep deprived.
I stay awake with blurry eyes, looking at her, feeling like an impostor, wondering what happy chance put her in my way and how can I make myself deserving of such beauty.
While others spend hours playing X-Box or Wii, I have chosen impatience, expectancy, distress, distrust and fence-sitting fibrillation as my favorite entertainments. I take photographs of the other half of my whole. Starting from the bottom, attempting the way up.
I sometimes feel like things are starting to fall into place and suddenly I’m brutally assaulted by questions about my so called talent. Something goes really wrong with my self esteem.
Tailcoated men walk by the reflection I’ve built of myself on a fuzzy mirror.