He is with her because she is the perfect bonus to the car. The ultimate tuning ornament.
She is with him because the car is the perfect complement to her sculpted body.
There’s no love in their agreement. No need of mutual affection or bounden duty.
He works in his car as an extension of himself, because he can’t repair or embellish a battered childhood.
She works in her body through expensive surgery and personal trainers to heal the lousy self concept of a sexually abused child.
None of them can articulate words to tell the story and break through the pains of memory, so they reinvent identity detail by detail, again and again, in cool and narcissistic company.
Therapy is too long and burdensome.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Happy together
On releasing the burden
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.
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.
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.
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.
Transilience
How did so many people walk away from the casualty with barely a scratch?
Who of them was the angel?
Playground reality show
On the second day of the pre-school year he was confronted with the perplexity of his own bloodlessness and vulnerability. “Nobody is all-powerful, you better learn to fight your own battles” was the only comfort he received at home when arriving with a purple eye and a blood stained jumper.
Six months later, the muddle of all fears had evolved in an almost obsessive commitment to survival. And it was all about that: being the strongest in the playground and the one destroying rivals at any means.
At ten he attempted rape over an older girl and things have only degenerated since his first real sociopathic endeavor.
Now tell me about the making of Attila the Hun: was it lack of love or too much television?
Freeze-frame moment
The mod girl and the absent minded boy are your thoughts in their way back to you. They are also subproduct of a ritual, figments of memory, the anthropologic communion of our imagination.
This is not what you are seeing, so go scratch the print and find out the truth.
Whether this is art or not is your final responsibility. How much of it can you take?
If you can see beauty, it was somewhat impossible for me to express. Dare to cut through the flesh of my wide open eye, like Simone Mareuil’s. But test the razor on your thumb first, and bleed.
You are witnessing the collapse of reality. Do you have what it takes to stay and hold on to awareness? This is my offering: a human puja, a black and white ex-voto, a momentary state of conviction and fatefulness. A quivering surrender to your judgment.