Some people seem to be just a space of resonance. The aimless, dismal and wild stallions of Ennui. The camera is drawn to them as to the void. There’s music surrounding the dreamy and self- absorbed dance, but as it touches the skin, the thoroughly sculpted hair, it blows up into quiet pieces and the atmosphere resembles the delirious, hot and touch-needy effect of doing ecstasy. I move around, holding the camera with a quavering hand and a tall glass of spirits in the other one. I need to go to the rest room, but it’s crowded with gothic girls making over their makeups, dudes in amorous dalliance against the walls or snorting coke like crazy. The three endeavors are done with bizarre nerve and sinew, so I decide to wait, acting considerate and discreet as always, if holding the need to pee, a glass and a camera at the same time can be considered considerate and discreet at all. The scenario is stirring, and arousing, the guy with the white rolled up sleeves is now smoking a cigarette, but he has not stopped dancing to light it and the sparkles spread through the solid air. If I didn’t give up smoking, I would ask him for one, or to share it with me, but I prefer watching the trance from the edges than letting myself drown in evanescence to the hilt.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Atonement
Her silhouette reveals as emerging from the totally black canvas of the cabaret.
Small tight feet in kinky boots, sexy pin-up fish net stockings, velvet garter, unbelievable prude bitsy hands keeping the gates of the land of promise.
I’m not sure if I like her. The energy of the shooting comes more from morbid curiosity than from true sympathy. The camera seems pulled to the orphan male shoes by the disturbance and the bewilderment of an absence. I stop looking at her face, benumbed, careless, insensitive and start wondering about the man, entangled and later devoured by black widow.
It was not my eye that beheaded the goddess, but the camera’s.
Oh, the forbidden pleasures of symbolic revenge.
The escort
She had a deep longing for someone who didn’t want to change her habits, thoughts or looks. She was done with an authoritarian father, bossy lovers, macho managers and contemptuous therapists.
After a decade of serial dating, she picked up the phone and officially became a regular escort client.
At some point as grown up, a woman may find great relief in the integrity of her bliss, and stop asking for permission or absolution for what she really wants.
Most of her girlfriends are jealous and they comment upon her behavior when she’s not present.
She is not that old to pay for company, and she is sexy, more than the average. Why should she get a gigolo, then?
There’s a certain body language indicative of discomfort or boredom in a man.
I’m a photographer. My job is to read other’s minds through their gestures.
Believe me. The guy was at home with her.
She sucked on a chupachups while paying absorbed attention to the races.
He was leaning his chest on her back, softly holding her hips.
I imagined that perfect red manicure running on his chiseled rear delts or pecs.
The portrait of perfect love.
Sadhearted psychodrama
It’s not their struggle for belonging, equality, social evenness and self esteem.
It’s our pitiful failure to take a warm look skin deep enough to realize that our crooked, freakish and gargoylish self image is coming back to get us.
Such a sad circus, such Grand Guignol only for us, the blind and the deaf.
Such a display of desperation carefully hidden under loads of makeup and silicone, only for us, who won’t dare to see.
Borderline Karoshi
Of course Mr. Mizuno can afford two mistresses. He deserves it. After all, he works sixteen hours a day with unenviable dedication (plus an hour and a half commuting).
As a matter of fact, he could afford this sort of erotic honeymoon in Madrid with more than two if he wanted. He will pay boob plastic surgery for both. And a very expensive stay at the Ritz. And then, back in Tokyo, he will go to the gardens and meditate on really profound things, purify his body in the public baths, then home to kiss Akiko and the children, and return to his normal habits. An year of sleep deprivation won’t let him enjoy other carnal pleasure than just looking at them, naked on fancy satin sheets. He will sleep long siestas while they go to their appointments with the surgeon (with a hired translator, also paid by him), or they burn the Visa in Serrano.
The only thing off limits for them is taking photos. No mementos, no souvenirs, no cameras allowed in this Spanish trip.
Bareback ride
It was Henri Bergson who wrote that the eye only sees what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
I think that the eye is only blessed by true beauty when the heart is ready to receive (and honor) whatever comes up, either if it’s beautiful or not.
There’s a powerful analogy between photography and love. The more I love, the better I see, the better I catch up the marvel moment, the brighter reality shows up on paper and screen.
I felt the horses galloping over my head, and the intense smell of dung and grass all over the racecourse. The sun was hitting vertical on the tracks and the noise of the hoofs from ground level waved electric through my body like an approaching stampede. I was totally in awe, riding my high, feeling so alive, so receptive, eager to absorb the moment and never let it go.
I’m not one of those people who go in raptures often. I’m quite latent, quite unaroused, secretly and silently passionate.
How much I owe to the woman who opened me up to this kind of bewilderment, striking truth into the eyes I now resist to shut.
It impresses me to no end the capacity of her presence to change my filters, to domesticate time and light in behalf of a clearer perception, to change the trajectory of my artistic purpose, to put my fears on hold, to make me proud of myself (as capable of love her in return, as deserving of her company), to encourage me to risk beyond comfort zone, turning all things threatening into potentially warmhearted, welcoming, hospitable ones, by melting my suits of armor and giving me my curiosity and my adventurous drive back.
I went into the shower, pleasantly tired of living fully. Just like a kid or a lover.
Six degrees of separation (Take One)
The girl with the dark glasses doesn’t know she is a swine flu carrier.
The older woman with the white bag standing behind her is the mother of the emergency room doctor that is going to diagnose her tomorrow.
The absent minded boy with a hand in his pocket is going to fall in love with the Peruvian girl that works in the bakery along with the man walking towards him across the street.
The black urban surfer with the black bag was once helped by a volunteer when he arrived to the coast of Cadiz in a patera, and the volunteer happens to be the father of the girl in white boots by his side.
The boy and the woman to the right of the photograph have stolen food at the supermarket where the girl with dark glasses works as a cashier.
The doctor in the emergency room still dreams about melting beneath the hands of the girl in white boots, who works as a masseur in a gym.
We all fit together in the endless slideshow of the One who will never let go anything unseen.
Transilience
How did so many people walk away from the casualty with barely a scratch?
Who of them was the angel?