We are so used to notice things in a numb trance, in order to save every slice and every morsel of life for later, that only when faced to a great deal of loss, tragedy, turmoil, fear and misadventure, totally crack-open we allow ourselves to feel, and to love and to mourn, and even to take a path of our choice and making. Jumping into the void, leaping, fearless.
When reality swings us down over the edge, we aknowledge the wild nature of our hearts, the preciousness of the moment, the value of each one of our encounters with the rest of us, the throbbing light of pain and pleasure, as still and silent in a black and white portrait.
Imagine what would be the story of you if all that could be rescued from a fire in your house was a small document photo of someone you loved dearly. Imagine that such a tiny, almost unsubstantial memento is the only thing you can hold on to for the rest of existence.
After imagining all your possessions absent, devastated, doomed, irretrievable, irreparable and gone, open your eyes to the wonder of now, and realize that it’s shaping the place where you belong, by this river. So instead of chasing happiness, remember it’s about just embracing everybody else in awe and gratitude, because joy doesn’t know the meaning of tomorrow.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
By this river
Seeking love from the devil
What you are hearing as you look at the image is not the ravenous voice of hunger, speaking out loud, working its way through the thick layers of repression. Mommy wants you to be a good boy, but she is becoming weaker than a whisper, and the new tone is the blunt, shameless, undomesticated manifestation of yourself, in a way you can see, in a way you can’t deny, in a way that moves you to action, although apparently benumbed and silent, giving you permission, opening the gates, letting out the flood.
Does it matter if it’s a poster of Lady Gaga’s next show or a girl without name at the door of a peep den? Does it matter if it’s London, Amsterdam or Madrid? Does it really matter if it’s dummy behind the windows of El Corte Inglés, or a wax figure at Madam Tussard’s?
It has worked, for the first time in your life. Better than a porno tape. Better than a Playboy. Better than Viagra. Better than Cialis. You walk faster, you reach and open the street door of your apartment building to finally make it through the craving with animal fruition, as she were going down, straddle legs, blossom red mouth, as she were the one moving your hands, your will, your loneliness, your appetite for love. A voice stronger than your mother’s. Alluring, provoking, mouth watering, juicy, irresistible. A voice in black and white. Speaking all the things forbidden and dirty.
Only for you.
In a dark time, the eye begins to see (*)
As a photographer, I’ve come to realize that certain emotions are invisible to eyes in immediate reality, but they appear, so uncanny familiar, so violent, so touching, once revealed in a photograph. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be if I couldn’t keep record of the overlooked, if I couldn’t stay a minute mindfully, compassionately connected with all the disowned selves of mine that show up in brief encounters, in relationships of no more than half of a minute.
What would my life be like if I couldn’t touch the spent threads of the past interweaved in the silken clothes of present. What kind of person would I be, unaware of the subtle evidence of human suffering meeting me at the borders of a shot?
Photography lets me feel the chill of winter on the skin and in the soul of strangers, and gives me a glimpse of their lives as a whole. It makes me aware and pushes me through the thickness of thought, more open, more available, much more tender and humble. And most of all, more careful and insightful, both qualities without which no photographer can evolve to what others call genius, and I suspect it’s the consistent choice to follow inner truth and inner knowingness, wherever they take us, whatever the moment we are meant to freeze so others can seize what really happens, what really happened and even foretell what is about to happen, beyond any attempt of self-definition.
(*) Quote by Theodore Roethke.
Covenants for the New Order
If I had charted the map of life before my forty somethings I would have placed quiet waters and true love in the far side of virgin territories.
As she appeared, all the things that I had been bereaved of found name and definition, as well as a bunch of minor neurosis that serve the purpose of holding reality tight and manageable.
Photography is some kind of portable memory device, but also an organic extension of desire, endearment and anxiety.
In one scene of Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, the character played by Samantha Morton opens a photo album, which holds the most precious moments of her life, the laughter of her lost parents, the enlightened eyes of the ones she gave smuggled ‘papers’ – sort of thumb sized chipsets granting freedom in a futuristic hyper-controlled world-, risking her own life. She says: Their faces are so beautiful, their eyes, their facial expressions’ and touches the album delighted in the warmly- embracing halo of past gone.
The album was not a video album, but an ordinary one, able to enhance the triggering of powerful emotional accounts. It was a tiny, thin album, compact and abridged. A summary of joy and feelings worthwhile remembering.
Sooner or later we will reach a tipping point, a harshly controlled global status. Emotions will be replaced with rules and the supreme act of rebellion will be to express love, intense convictions and feelings. We are doomed, we are playing with fire and numbing ourselves in order to avoid the responsibility that comes along with freedom. Huxley’s Brave New World, The Sphynx and Gattaca are not that implausible.
When those cold and unfeeling times arrive, my dynamic photo album will store a few photos of my daughters while they were discovering life, Delia’s feet dancing in quiet, peaceful waters and one of my young, bewildered and be-good-enough years. My girls’ photos to stay alive, my own portrait to remember I can survive.
The anechoic chamber
Fifty years ago, while in Harvard, John Cage went into a totally silent room, an echoic chamber. He didn’t expect to hear two sounds: his own nervous system working by itself, and the rumor of blood circulating. The reason he did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on his part. That epiphanic experience gave his life a new North: the exploration of nonintention. If he wasn’t playing that music, who was? From then on, he composed music giving up making choices, and trading will for questions. He surrendered beauty to chance, tossing three coins six times, yielding the sixty four hexagrams of I Ching to get the great-circle course of harmonics.
Sometimes, when I take photographs, life stops, the noise of the mind stops, and I can only hear my own blood stream, my body working in automatic pilot, the click like a gunshot, the vive senses (plus intuition) brought together to a single setting, into a single figure. In those moments I wish I could handle the process at will, play it slow motion, be my own witness in awe, in love. Mute.
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.
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.