Animated me

Reenacting one of my childhood nightmares.

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City of Others

I'm planning to launch a website to showcase some of my recent photographic work. Therefore, I've been researching ways to display the photographs on the website and create a layout that is exciting for my viewers. By mere coincidence, I bought a pair of jeans from an L.A. brand called City of Others and followed the instructions on the tag, which led me directly to this amazing photo display! (I wonder how many hundreds of hours of programming it took to create it)

---------------------------- update Feb 21 -----------------------------

That amazing photo viewing application is called TiltViewer and you can download it for free.

In Stanley Park

A perfect Sunday afternoon if you ask me!

(special thanks to Emilio, a.k.a the breathing tripod)

I heart Vancouver

This city is covered in fog and I'm ecstatic! Although most people wish it went away, I can't help but love the way it turns the whole city into a David Lynch movie set. And although I once said "don't photograph landscapes", this fog is the perfect excuse for a photo aficionado like myself to put on my tights and wander around the city in my bike shooting this:

Jantonia

El Kiraz

receta: un elenco insuperable y una Canon 40D.
modo de preparación: dejar al Kiraz hacer de las suyas y tirar 35 fotos consecutivas.

Beachness

And this is what happens when I get end-of-year euphoria.

Fog

And tonight we live in heavy fog.

















Rumor says, the fog is to blame for that incessant ship's horn in the harbor.

Don't Photograph Landscapes

Here is the article that I wrote following Herzog's talk last week. The Ubyssey newspaper published an edited version in last Friday's culture section...but it's Sunday and I've decided to privilege my blogfans with the original version. Enjoy!


Don't Photograph Landscapes

“I’m not here to show my work, I’m here to start a dialogue” said Fred Herzog, as he introduced himself to the eager crowd of aspiring photographers that attended UBC Photosociety’s first annual general meeting at the SUB on September 25. “I hope I can be interrupted often, and I hope you get used to my accent.” At that moment, a projector was fired up, marking the beginning of a memorable evening with the renowned Vancouver photographer.

Herzog’s work needed no introduction. After forty years of photographing street scenes in this city, his images of Vancouver have become as common to photographers as the totem poles in Stanley Park. Yet, it was the photographer’s presence, his own voice explaining his photographs that filled the evening with magic. The kind of magic that exudes from Herzog’s lively, colorful prints.

Born in Germany, Herzog moved to Vancouver in the 1950s and soon began capturing the life of the city with his camera. He separated himself from other photographers by shooting mostly in Kodachrome, a color slide film that was hard to turn into prints. This limited his ability to exhibit because “Making cibachrome prints was not feasible. It was almost impossible for me to make a profit selling the prints.” Thus, although his collection of slides continued to grow, his work remained in the dark for decades.

In a way, however, this initial marginalization helped to turn Herzog into a living legend. His images were taken decades before the were finally shown in galleries, turning his exhibitions into colorful odes to nostalgia. It takes only a minute or two of glancing at the impressive colors and contrast in his photographs to understand the power of images that bring back to life an era that is generally remembered in black and white.

Moreover, anyone that attended Herzog’s fantastic retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery last year understands that there is something very personal about his work. His images occur in the most public spaces, yet they remain deeply intimate. As spectators, it feels as if Herzog has suddenly allowed us to take a glimpse into the private life of his subjects, making us all voyeurs of life in an epoch that is foregone but never forgotten.

As a projector showed us some of Herzog’s famous images, Herzog explained that photography is about looking, about waiting. He mocked people who carry a bag full of expensive lenses saying “the picture has to be in your head, not in your camera bag” and underlined the importance of concentrating on a moment, on a sudden detail that makes an otherwise irrelevant scene unique. With this, Herzog revealed his place in the long tradition of documentary photographers who, like Cartier Bresson, causally roamed the streets waiting for the instant précis to capture a unique event forever.

Considering the inherent difficulty of shooting people on the streets, Herzog was quick to explain that it is imperative to look for body language, which includes clothing. Stopping the projector at a picture of a woman with a cigarette in her hand, he said that first impressions matter because humans automatically make judgments of the people they see, and thus, a photograph has to capture a gesture or a detail that gives a strong first impression. He then added, that “if you look long enough, you can find vitality anywhere.”

When asked about the risks of photographing strangers, Herzog first shared that “people have shouted at me, people have told me to get away, people have told me to get off their property, and people have threatened me with calling the police.” Thus, he suggested that we “shoot first, and ask questions later!” However, he confessed that in his particular case it has been easier since by the time he started exhibiting, most of the subjects in his pictures were too old to care. Almost jokingly, he suggested to wait thirty years before publishing a picture of a stranger because “a dead person will not take you to court!”

As the evening came to an end, Herzog delivered his most poetic moment. “To me, the city is a stage and the people on the streets are all actors.” In this sense, Herzog stressed that “We need to record how people look in their natural state…it’s the reality of how we look.” He explained that if photographers don’t accept the task of showing people with no interference, without staging them, then we will lose any visual evidence of the way we really were.

As a closing remark, Herzog comically reminded us for the twentieth time that in order to succeed as photographers, “don’t photograph landscapes, everybody does it, and nobody cares.”

Fred Herzog @ UBC

Last week I had the privilege to attend a talk with legendary Vancouver photographer Fred Herzog. My task was to take a portrait of him and then write a piece for the Ubyssey newspaper. I must confess they both proved to be tremendously difficult tasks.

Trying to take a photograph of a lecturer without intruding or without distracting him and the audience is obviously hard. And it becomes even harder when you are being judged by dozens of aspiring photographers in the audience and when your subject is a man who made his name in the history books of photography for shooting unsuspecting people in public places!

As the evening progressed and Herzog continued to talk about his work, I found it increasingly complicated to find a good moment to take my camera out and stand up to snatch a pic. I thought that maybe I should just wait until the end and ask him to pose for me with the white wall of the room as a background. But then...just as I was about to give up, Herzog said the magic words: "I like to record how people look in their natural state...it's the reality of how we look. I don't stage pictures." Aha!

I put my camera bag between my legs and quietly opened the zipper. I turned the power switch of my camera "On" and quickly adjusted the exposure settings. Herzog said "you have to wait for a good moment, for a gesture, a detail." And like a hunter, I waited.

Suddenly, the slideshow ended and the lights came on. It was over. Had I lost my chance? I became increasingly nervous...and then the miracle happened. Herzog was asked to sign a book. He walked straight towards me to find a pen on the chair next to mine (I was sitting on the front row). Then, without warning, he took a step back, slowly raised his pen to the light...and surely heard my loud CLICK!

My Brazil

Although the possessive adjective in the title might suggest that I acquired a portion of that country or that I somehow received the power to appropriate national abstractions, this post is simply a "cultural gazette" on a series of Brazilian experiences that I had.

First, I went to the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival (which, I'm proud to say, was organized by a young Mexican) and watched the film Proibido Proibir, which was truly excellent and inspiring. I won't spoil your experience of watching it by discussing the plot here, but the views of Brazilian society provided by the film functioned as a great complement to the notion I had of the favelas and social divisions in that country. Also, the story managed to jerk a tear or two from my face...which is always very much appreciated by your blogger.

Second, I went to the CSS (Cansei De Ser Sexy) concert at the Commodore Ballroom and enjoyed it even more than the first time I saw them at Coachella 2007. The singer was incredibly energetic and the music had me dancing all night long. This automatically led me to rediscover their amazing CSS Suxx album.

Third, I was recently introduced the work of the great Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado. It only took an hour of looking at his book "Workers" to fully reinvigorate my belief that photojournalism not only has the power to effectively denounce injustices, but that photojournalists have a responsibility to find and expose those places where abuse and injustice are hidden from everyday discussion.

Lastly, I still haven't forgotten the Vik Muniz expo I saw this summer. In a way, it changed the way I think of perception and has even affected the way I take photographs.

(And yes...there is a Brazilian girl.)

Vik Muniz: Reflex @ San Ildefonso

I must say that my most enjoyable hours in Mexico City this August were spent at the Vik Muniz Reflex expo at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (the Jeff Wall expo is a close second). My first contact with this Brazilian artist happened while studying photography at AAVI in Mexico City, but I had never seen his work outside of books. I remembered him as an artist that questioned the boundaries between photography and sculpture.

Reflex was not only surprising for its scope, but it opened my eyes to an artist whom I had previously only admired for his aesthetic quality. Vik Muniz's art is charged with a deep intellectual exploration that became evident as I strolled around the rooms of the incredibly curated expo at San Ildefonso. The work not only grabbed my attention with its inherent visual beauty, but through the photographs, I began to understand Muniz's questioning of our cognitive processes.

It was exciting to stand in front of a peanut butter and jelly Mona Lisa and force my brain to forget Da Vinci, to forget the face, and focus on the materials...to step back and interrupt the way in which my brain automatically assigns names and values to the forms it sees. Or to look at a landscape with a "fake" cloud and realize that my mind cannot escape seeing it as a cloud.

But it was even more surprising to face the "Pictures of Junk". To me, the strong environmental message in "Saturn" and "Narcissus" is truly amplified by the size of the prints and the scale of the objects in the images. Plus, it is inevitable to spend minutes trying to imagine how the artist produced such images. (for details, watch this interview)

The most unique part of the expo was possibly the very last series of photos...the most recent ones. In them, Muniz presents little heaps of random materials mixed together. The materials he usually uses to create his works, the ones that usually come together to represent other recognizable forms or faces, are suddenly shown in formless heaps, full blown and occupying an entire wall. Devoid of the possibility of interpretation, these photographs seemed like a tribute to the actors that made his work possible throughout the years... an ode to the countless pieces of rubbish that Muniz used as clues for patterns that our brains are quick to assemble.

If you're in DF, don't miss it!

Jeff Wall @ Museo Tamayo

Funny. I spend a whole year in Vancouver and I never see a Jeff Wall print face to face. But I go to Mexico City for just a week and I'm suddenly surrounded by some of my favorite photos by Wall at the Museo Tamayo.

As you can read in that link above, the expo was a combination of documentary and cinematographic photos by the Vancouver photographer, and it was curated in such a way that you couldn't tell which were which. Or could you? Well, for those of us who have studied Jeff Wall, the division was obvious. And the museum did provide a simple guide as to which photos belonged to which genre. Yet, I felt that the expo could have provided more clues or background information to understand the importance of Wall's work.

Quoting from Charlotte Cotton's The Photograph as Contemporary Art, "Wall's careful construction of a grouping of peripheral things prompts questions about our own relationship with photographs: Why are we looking at this? At what point in history and our own lives did a corner of a floor represented in a photograph become iconic, worthy of our attention? To what degree does it need to be abstracted by the seemingly innocent frame in order for us to recognize this grouping of non-subjects to be a still life? The beauty of Wall's photography is that, while it raises these complex questions, it still satisfies us as works of art" (131).

Anyway, don't miss it if you're in Mexico City...but definitely read The Luminist before you go.

Chikita Violenta en Seattle

Acabo de regresar del concierto de Chikita Violenta en Seattle. No he tenido mucho tiempo de bloggear porque el viernes me lanzo al DF y tengo muchos "quehaceres" pendientes antes de regresar al motherland. Pero les comparto que me dió un gusto tremendo estar en la primera gira internacional de la Chikita y verlos rockear en la ciudad de Cobain y Vedder. Como dijo Andrés desde el escenario, "We were eating a pizza a block away from here and I suddenly noticed they were playing Alice in Chains. And then I realized it has always been a dream for us to stand on a stage in the city that gave birth to grunge."

Fueron la banda principal de la noche, y la única que logró que todo el público del High Dive se acercara al escenario a rockear. Jero Jiménez, baterista de Simona, fue el músico invitado de la gira y le inyectó dos kilos de extra punch a todas las rolas. Mad skills, that boy, maaaad skills. Trataron de cerrar la noche con "The Last Film", pero la rola alborotó demasiado a la gente y tuvieron que regresar a tocar un encore no planeado: repitieron la rola abridora, "War" porque, como explicó Armando, "we didn't have time to practice every single song with the new drummer!






Felicidades a la Chikita Violenta por su primera gira...and keep on rockin'!

Folk Music Festival, part 3

On Sunday, I decided to put the lens cap on my camera for a while and become a true festival-goer. The first thing I discovered were the dozens of hoola-hoops scattered around the lawns at Jericho Park, waiting for a moving waist to give them a shake. I stepped over a purple one and suddenly became one of the hundreds, maybe thousands of curious festival-goers that enjoyed an instant flashback to childhood on that sunny Sunday at Jericho.

After a quick escape to eat an organic lentil wrap (veeery Vancouver), I went back to the main stage area and realized I was the only person without a blanket to mark his territory on the grass. The blanket situation requires a full post by itself, but I will just say that it looked like an unspoken "who brought the most exotic blanket to the park" contest. After a full ten minutes of trying to penetrate the blanket crowd and stepping on them all (accompanied by the classic "sorry, excuse me, sorry again, oh oops, coming through, hi sorry..."), I finally found a miniature blanketless square of grass and sat to enjoy the music of Bachir Attar and the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

As the sun was setting, I walked back to the media tent to meet the festival volunteer that would escort me to the back of the main stage in order to shoot the closing act of the festival. I knew it would be an important band, but I read the name of the performer and it didn't ring any bells. That explains why, when I entered the backstage area and saw Michael Franti calmly dribbling his soccer ball, I just said "excuse me" and walked past him.

Ten minutes later, I found myself mesmerized by Michael Franti. Watching him appear on stage was shocking and his music had a je ne sais quoi that left me in awe. I was paralyzed. I spent a whole song simply looking at him jump around the stage and absorbing his energy. Seeing a performer on stage makes us forget that they also walk as humans...on normal ground. To our eyes, they belong on stage, with lights and microphones and a fake background. But this man that had been so calmly playing with his soccer ball on the grass behind the stage, suddenly appeared before my eyes as the cause of all the shouts and the crowd's sudden hysteria. Anyway... here are the pics I shot after I got out of the trance:

Folk Music Festival, part 2

On Saturday I arrived just in time to see the master himself, Martin Sexton. There are only three letters that can describe this man: WOW. He injected the Jericho lawns with a spiritual energy that sent an extended cue for collective goosebumps. His voice reminded me of Ray Charles and Paul Simon, mixed with Dave Matthews on his better days (oh, sacrilegious comparison, I know). After him, I managed to get an escort to go on stage again and shoot the amazing set of Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet featuring Béla Fleck. Yes, I repeat, Béla Fleck, the banjo sensei that won 4 Grammys and was the only performer whose music I had on my iTunes! The main stage was suddenly turned into a display of virtuosismo by the banjos and the two violins that accompanied them. She delighted the audience with a song in Chinese and a story about her love for the time she spent recording there. Fleck was wearing a wicked pair of sunglasses that had some sort of foldable metallic window with a question mark and made it almost impossible to get a photo without a crazy glare.

The last act of last night was Spirit of the West, a band that had a truly personal connection with the audience. After 25 years of performing together, this Vancouver band is a favorite of the local crowd...some of their songs tell elaborate tales of North Van and sound like a Broadway musical. I wouldn't say I loved their songs, but it was impossible to keep still while listening to them. In what sounded like the celtic folk equivalent to a motivational poster, I was soon shaking my body to a fiddle and a mandolin! I hereby share my photos of this second night:

(click to enlarge)

Folk Music Festival

This weekend is very special for me. I'm covering the Vancouver Folk Music Festival for The Ubyssey newspaper! My assignment is to take photographs and write an article giving my opinion about the festival. I must say that I'm far from being a folk music connoisseur, but it's been a fantastic experience so far. On Friday I saw Aimee Mann, for whom I had great expectations (she won a Grammy for the Magnolia soundtrack), but she was dull on stage and sounded very monotonous. After her concert, I decided to try and see if I could get a press pass to take some shots of the closing act from the stage (it never hurts to ask). The media relations people were delighted to escort me to the stage corridor and soon after I was frantically taking pictures of Ozomatli!

Their show was so charged with energy that it made everybody in the audience stand from their portable chairs (yes, Vancouverites come very prepared to beachside festivals...with enormous organic cotton blankets from some country they can't pronounce and the most professional foldable chairs that make a Tesla engine look simple). It was very pleasing to see the large crowd singing, or at least trying to sing in Spanish and loving every second of Ozomatli's eclectic mix of Mexican folk and hip hop. As always, Ozomatli ended their concert by jumping off stage with large drums and doing a sort of carnival parade around the field. Here are some photos I took on this first day:

(click to enlarge)

Walking on the Moon

Ahhh...the joys of low tide in the English Bay!

(Click on the photos!)

On interpretation

Reality or interpretation? Can memory be evidence? Can photography? Does it even matter? (and where am I coming from?)

I saw the film The Passenger yesterday. The director, Andrzej Munk, died in a car accident while driving home from the set before the movie was finished. The film was shot in Auschwitz and tells the story of a female SS officer that remembers one of the prisoners in the camp, Martha. However, because the movie wasn't finished, the only thing the viewers get is a piecing together of the parts that were shot, with still images and a narration of the parts that are missing. The narrator warns that the movie could be a mere interpretation of the director's intention. In other words, the movie is put together following the memory of what Munk wanted to show.

Almost metaphorically, the movie is about memory and interpretation. The SS officer, Lisa, shares her memory of life in the camp with Martha. All the images we see and the story we experience comes from Lisa's recollection. The scenes become a battle between reality and interpretation, between evidence and memory. Through Lisa's eyes we see life in Auschwitz as Lisa wants to remember it. We only see the version of the death camp that Lisa's mind allows her to remember...all else is blocked. Atrocities are erased and abuse is blurred in the background, while in the foreground lies a story of two women immersed in a power struggle. Martha appears energetic, defiant, even well fed. She doesn't drag herself through the camp like a prisoner that is broken down by life in the camp. Her eyes don't show the emptiness of a person that is merely waiting for death. However, this is only how Lisa wanted to remember her. She envied Martha. She was fascinated by her. So Lisa's mind chooses to remember Martha in a way that blocks out all the suffering...and ultimately, eliminates all the guilt of being an SS officer.

I go through a similar thought process whenever I see the work of a photojournalist. They bring us a reality that is first interpreted by their lens, but then passes through a series of filters: the choice of developer, toner, paper (or digital channels and filters)...and then the editing (inclusion/elimination) of the photographs in the series. Their work is a visual memory of their life experiences. But is it evidence? A photojournalist interprets a time and place where we were never present...and our absence gives this rendering a feeling of reality. To me, there is always something mysterious about a photograph that depicts an event: the exclusion from the frame of everything that was not directly in front of the lens. The reality that was not included gives the depicted event an air of mere interpretation...of memory that cannot be taken as evidence. (I'll stop now before somebody cries plagiarism of Susan Sontag).

And all this blathering was just to share the work of Brent Stirton.

Best of Craigslist Vancouver

And in an accidental moment of binary code magic, Google sent me here. I thank thee, mine beloved search engine, for thou hast once again illuminated my life.

If I had to choose... I'd say that,

This one made my day:
"(...) Have you never had to clean dog shit out off of a pair of New Balance runners before? Maybe you should take a look at how many ridiculous grooves there are in the soles."

I felt empathy for this public transit hater:
"(...) Trying to make it sound like you're some hot-shot in a high-rise, well we all know your secret. If you're a hot-shot in a high rise then what the fuck is your ass doing riding a bus?"

But my love goes to this one:
"(...) I know that you love your boyfriend. You know HOW I know that? Because you've told me that. Five times. In the last two minutes."

Also, don't miss the 2 effective methods for bathing a cat.

And my brief photographic tribute to the cherry blossom around the block: