Place
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As other photographers have discovered, great images materialize below an invisible line that bisects the Western Hemisphere, tracing a path through Mexico’s midriff and east through the Caribbean, skirting the Tropic of Cancer.
Below that line, hidden beneath the Latin American stereotype (tequila, mariachi bands, swine flu, girls gone wild), lies a cultural vitality that rises up from the land and the sea, born from alchemy of ancient civilizations, mysticism, the Catholic church and colonialism – imbuing the people themselves with a soul sometimes only a camera can see.
In the Torrid Zone, there is much more passion and far fewer pretensions, even if there does exist what gringos would consider a blushing degree of machismo. Bones are not even made about that. Life is to be either clung to or seized, regardless of birth rite. The cards you are dealt, you deal with. So suffer. Form a movement and suffer. Or depart the card table in a blaze of gunfire, guaranteeing your place among the ubiquity of eroding granite Guevaras. The other side is better anyway, the locals will say. Wink at the gods, and drink up!
Inside this equatorial quilt are sewn pockets of society not usually recorded in the popular media. There are resort beaches for that, not neon soaked alleyways buried deep in the barrio. Well then, no sailboats, no Hemingway home? Then how about a colorful sunset or sexy mujera? Sorry, but we do have deforestation. And doorways into the soul. And kids laughing. And Cohiba-smokin’ Mestizos in pearl suits. And squalor. And somewhere, a revolución on the boil.
People
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Look deep into the face of a “Rasta man” and you can see all the way into the past, to the dusty plateaus of Abyssinia – to the 1930s, and to the crowning of an emperor, Haile Selassie. It’s here, in Ethiopia, that the Rastafarian’s story begins.
The coronation fulfilled a prophecy of Selassie as the Black Man’s chosen redeemer, launching a movement that would spawn an entire religion based on 21 tenets of truth – chief of which was a belief that God and man are one and the same.
It’s hard to dispute, given the magnitude of his gaze… unless you continue to stare, reaching further back into history, to a time when his soul was ripped from the heart of tribes with the names of Ashanti and Mangingo and Yoruba, and transplanted to the heart of the Caribbean. Stare even longer into his eyes and you’ll discover another, simpler truth, recounted in a traditional proverb: “Time longer than rope.”
As a descendent of slaves, turns out he is right.
Texture
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We open them, we close them. We pause, then walk purposefully through them. We duck if we’re too tall, or linger inside their protective frame before saying good-bye. We sometimes look up before entering one, just in case something dangling overhead requires a kiss. But mostly, we simply walk by them.
Yet doorways and windows and walls, they tend to surround us, dictating the twists and turns we take in our day. We learn early on that how we perceive ourselves in relation to others, what we call home, or work or Main Street or Wall Street, is determined in part by their structure. It’s easy to take walls and windows and doorways for granted. And doesn’t familiarity breed something of a disdain? It’s only a wall.
Hah! – not so, if you’re familiar with the urban surroundings in Cuba. You turn a corner and stop flat in your tracks, gaping at the abstract design that years of dilapidation have dissolved into a Rauschenberg or Kandinskii or some sort of expressionist art, exposing variegated textures that offer a peek into history through a colorful patchwork of decomposition. It can be like an archeological dig for the eyes, but that’s for the eyes. For the mind, they are portals into the past. If you must call it by name, then a “window,” but a window into the soul of a people. Look further inside, and you can see Che Guevara leading the charge against General Batista, and before that, the art nouveau style of the Cigar Makers Guild, then to the canon ball holes of the Spanish occupation. Even the ghosts of African slaves, drunk, sweating the tobacco they’ve struggled to grow and spoiling for a rebellion, come knocking.
Honestly, though. It’s just a wall.
Intrigue
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Emerging from the mélange of Mexico’s visual intrigue is a macabre sight called Isla de las Munencas, or Island of the Dolls, located along an ancient canal outside of Mexico City.
The destination takes about two hours via trajinera, propelled through the water by a long wooden pole and the morbid desire to see a place populated only by dolls. As legend has it, the island became haunted by the apparition of a small girl who drowned nearby, prompting its owner to hang a single doll from a tree to appease her spirit. Since then, hundreds of dolls have converged on the island, where they dangle from trees, pray at an altar, pose for the camera and plot bizarre machinations.
Midnight Oil
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They recall 1924, when California’s “Big Oil” commenced with a boom at the corner of Golden West and Clay. Or 1933, when fresh discoveries launched a Star Wars style occupation of “cricket pumps” that dotted the Bolsa Chica plateau. It might be 1953, when oil – and presumably wealth – could come bubbling up in the backyard if your dog buried his bone far enough. Today, the oil rigs of Huntington Beach rattle on as more of a curious backdrop to the city’s popular surf scene, an anachronism of Southern California’s early industrial surge that refuses to fade quietly into the past.
This series derives from three consecutive nights in the oil fields (a term that includes the modern-day sidewalk) of Huntington Beach, using only available neon and the natural light of a harvest moon.
Of particular interest were the variety of cricket pumps scattered about in curious places, refusing to surrender their ground to the grim encroachment of concrete. Mostly the loyal conscripts of a local oil baron, they cling to an assortment of urban locations ringing the expansive Bolsa Chica deposits, meaning you might literally bump into one during a stroll down Garfield Avenue. They seem almost life-like, bobbing down in perpetual rhythm over a watering hole of former petroleum fortune. With the plaintive moan of a short-stroke motor, they rise, rock their head back, gasp, then plunge their proboscis once again into the earth in a relentless attempt to suck the last possible drop from the region’s fossil bed – resisting, for now at least, their own extinction.
Urban Perspectives
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From Alfred Stieglitz to Robert Frank, and within every genre of artistic expression besides photography, modern man has been attempting to reconcile the alienation of an industrialized world.
These days, the focus has been less on separation/exclusion and more on the vulnerability (perceived or otherwise) wrought by the Digital Age and its march toward utter transparency. Either way, man vs. machine is still at the heart of the matter. High technology. Concrete blocks. Steel walls. Our backs remain up against it.
Urban Perspectives takes a crack at the soft tissue issues facing a post-industrial society that is becoming increasingly complex, having done nothing to resolve the monster we already assembled. In fact, I started out by contemplating a series entitled “LAlienation,” which would examine more closely the less commonly held perception of Los Angeles as a complete and utter wasteland of loneliness for a significant portion of people. In the meantime, Chicago, Tokyo, L.A. and other epicenters of progress provide a convenient resource for examining our evolving urban landscape, our relationship to the cities within which we live, and the unique contrasts that materialize among them.
Wet Dreams
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If you’re a “flatlander” visiting Orange County, then the enriched white bread nature of its affluent communities might strike you as odd. Or perfectly fitting, if your image of Southern California – sun, fun, prosperity, sex – has been at all shaped by popular culture over the past 50 years.
Yet a certain gap exists between reality and perception, not only between the wealthy and the struggling – who have emigrated mostly from Mexico and are stacked on top of each other in Santa Ana – but within our own mental state. This series toys with that variable dimension between the literal and figurative, using the beaches of California as a backdrop. In fact, it deals very little with the California dream, and more with the ethereal, dream-like state between light and dark, consciousness and sleep, tierra firma and the horizon… reality and our imagination. When does one stop and the other begin? Perhaps we fluctuate in a sort of permanent space between the two.
Wet Dreams probes visually this trestle between the real and unreal, gravitating from one end to the other, depending on the image made. Besides contrasts in light, the representations of water and land (or structure) reinforce the dichotomy of what is fluid and fleeting, even spiritual, and what is tangible or relatively certain. In each image there is some degree of solitude, based on the premise that calm, in whatever manner experienced, enables greater participation of the senses, and therefore easier access into this realm – both for the subject within the scene and us, the viewer.
Just Deserts
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To get your just desserts is to get what’s coming, and not necessarily in the most appealing way. However, the payoff for spending time under a full moon in the desert, or exploring the majestic beauty of Death Valley, can be sweet reward.
In fact, visitors to the American Southwest are treated to a stunning array of natural formations, some of which can be witnessed from the car window (e.g., Monument Valley), others which require a good deal of effort to find. Two such places are “The Wave,” located along the border of Arizona and Utah, and Antelope Canyon, just east of the Grand Canyon.
It’s fairly easy to identify “The Wave” once it is reached, although the hike requires a specially issued BLM permit. Its psychedelic contortion of sandstone rock lies on the slopes of the Coyote Buttes in southern Utah. Historically, as the earth cooled and desert rains pounded the landscape, taffy-like formations emerged that resemble deformed pillars, cones, mushrooms and other odd creations. “The Wave” represents the twisted heart of all that kinetic activity. Deposits of iron add to the unique blending of color, creating a dramatic rainbow of pastel yellows, pinks and reds. As luck would have it, puddles formed from a heavy rain the night before the photographs were made, creating a beautiful reflection in one of the images that is nearly indiscernible from the actual formation itself.
No less impressive is Antelope Canyon, which delivers some of the Southwest’s more stunning moments as the sun punctures its narrow cavity with celestial light at different times of the day. Known as a slot canyon, Antelope Canyon offers the visitor a living spectacle as visual perceptions shift with the rotating shadows, revealing the shapes of animals, profiles of people and the occasional subterranean ghost!