As I mentioned in my previous post, I´m working at the Luciérnaga, a magazine created and sold to help out street kids. Right now, until my Spanish becomes a bit better (it´s already good, but I´m hardly ready to be conducting interviews and writing articles), I´m focusing mainly on photography to go along with some of the articles. And photographically, this is turning out to be an incredible opportunity.
Aside from taking the photos that they want for the magazine, I´m beginning my own photo project featuring each of the kids. When I say "kids," I really mean young adults - they´re my age. Anywhere from 16-26, there are about 20 to 30 people that come in regularly for a meal and to sell the magazine. This photo project is an art of simply hanging out and getting to know these guys well enough for them to be comfortable enough to let me do a portrait session or two. And the first step in this is establishing a mutual level of respect. A lot of these guys really don´t respect women - not in the sense that we´re used to in the states anyway. And I´m afraid that if I don´t approach this the right way, they´ll think that I don´t respect them. So it´s just a matter of being cool with each other - standing up for myself, but not letting any disrespectful comments bother me. And proving to them that just because I come from a totally different background doesn´t mean that I´m any better or worse than they are. It´s a slow process.
But the great thing about this is that it´s my job - the photos that I have so far, simply, are awful. But it´s a beginning. And my job is to go back and shoot and reshoot until I get what I´m looking for. If there´s one thing that I learned from the portrait series that I did for the Metro Pulse (
http://www.metropulse.com/photos/galleries/2011/jun/29/what-makes-you-knoxvillian/),
it´s the importance of reshooting. Honestly, any of the photos that I took in college that might have been considered to be "good" were luck. I didn´t work for them. I was in the right place at the right time and pulled the trigger enough times to get something that could be worked with. I never reshot anything (except for my skateboard friends, and oddly enough, those turned out to be some of my more successful shoots). And gosh, I wish I had. The difference between shooting something once, and going back and reshooting that same subject, is the level of authenticity. This is even evident in my photos from Carnival a few posts earlier - they´re not good because I was just a spectator who happened to be in the right place at the right time. If I had known something about what was happening, or had had the opportunity to reshoot it even once more, the photos would have been a lot better. It´s shallow and unfocused, like so much of what I´ve done so far.
But enough ramblings, here are some photos from my first day of hanging out with some of the guys.
They´re not what I want - at all, but they´re a beginning. I´m just trying to get comfortable with everyone and to get them comfortable with me. And it´s all part of getting beyond the level of shallowness that I´m so familiar with. Rilke wrote, "...sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better." These early, awful photos are me getting the shallowness, my own sickness, out of the way, so that I can get down to something real.
Gonzalo
Buenhonda
Fumar
Fumados
Fumando
Los Chicos
