Damask And Tiffany Blue Wedding

look outside, looking in: reflections from the camera.

by Armando Salazar Larrea

"is not pry into private but to be part of it"
(Henri Cartier Bresson)

"what important is not how a photographer sees the world,
important thing is their intimate relationship with him "(Antoine D'Agata)

The two phrases written above belong to two photojournalists from the Magnum agency, the one, Cartier Bresson, promoter of the famous "decisive moment" photograph was posed to find an image to synthesize what that moment of life was in essence, raised and a way to shoot from the cultured intellectual and computer in the world looking to find meanings in shooting. This idea, which shook the foundations of the profession of photojournalism was taken years later by the direct cinema documentary filmmakers like Albert Maysles that documentary called this attitude of "fly on the wall"; be in place and not be both. Cartier Bresson relates to the world by being part of the stage and from there try to feel the life is plotted against the lens, is part of it but not involved.

The other quote is by someone known at all (unless one is a fixed user of the website of Magnum): Antoine D'Agata . French as well but that belongs to a radically different world. His images speak of prostitutes, sexual extremism and other indoor areas, not in vain disciple of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark (the one who made that sensational long on youth and AIDS that called "Kids"). D'Agata not believe in it not being and being, for him the photographer is a direct participant in the creation of the image so it away is not important, what matters is being part of what happens in front of the camera and, if happens is marginal, dangerous, gritty, even better.

These two positions seem to want to force to decide where we place ourselves, in the territory of which notes and comments or in the territory of which observes and participates. This apparent requirement to be defined within one of the poles of the documentary craft, it becomes a straitjacket when you're looking for the location of its own view. While Cartier Bresson photographed in the fifties and D'Agata the two thousand, both now seem like two very decisive and totalizing looks like others that also marked his own territory immovable:

• The camera as an instrument of denunciation and hence political, that is the eyes of photographers like Eugene Smith or filmmakers like Joris Ivens who came to the big issues with a clear intention to change the world.
• The camera as a witness to the marginalization and the other portrayal instrument but never of oneself, is a demagogic look with deep awareness of class (it is assumed that as a subject that is), there is Sebastiao Salgado or any Latin American documentary to see the countryside from a paternalistic view where the exotic, the marginal and the funny thing boss.
• The look of melancholy lyric that attempts to transform its formal project in a social project as do Chris Marker or Juan Carlos Rulfo ( Del Olvido to I do not remember) where the film is assumed from the poetry and not from reality.
• The camera-mirror, the documentary as an extension of the daily intimate personal introspection and subjectivity that are not accountable to anyone. Here are many contemporary filmmakers tired of compulsory to change the world, preferring to start with themselves.

All these territories of the documentary are always built from a concept or idea concisely: the documentary as a translator, and recovery, such as reflexive or as a privileged witness.

But there is another dynamic in the documentary, a dynamic of being a resident of an intermediate space. A clear example is the work of Robert Frank, photographer and filmmaker art (art of feeling, not form) which in 1955 became a non-stereotypical project called THE AMERICANS , a document that took a year for photo tour by the U.S. on a different documentary idea that leads us to the world of intimacy but, therefore, lose sight of the respect and the structures of society, is a type of image you try to understand and comment and raises once we see the world always ask how we're watching. Between, or artistic or media and that is halfway between the eyes of Cartier Bresson and D'Agata A ntoine , an image that is not clearly identified or the art or with the press nor the news, is an area where the form is completed to see what life gives the documentary on a search and a constant struggle between what is and what we believe it is. This type of image documentary not always in the news, not always reflect intimate, not always aesthetically, not always document, part of a need for contact with life, human beings and spaces. This need to bump it everyday and not catch it, read the life and not think about it unilaterally, to seek and do not know, to try and it might not achieve by being at a non-place, limbo of live in a life time full of intensity, of chance and uncertainty is a documentary style where there's no room for the pose, the filatiquería artistic or aesthetic cult, is the territory of the doubt and not that of an assumed superiority over that recorded creative.

Photo: Robert Frank - THE AMERICANS (1956)

The question in all its forms is the driving force behind this way of working: The question of whether this is the correct camera position, whether or not it bother or how it is being perceived. The question to understand what life really is happening in front of us , how conflicts are resolved and what is at stake. Sometimes temporary certainty appears that we found something, that something of course, nothing lasts and continues the ongoing struggle against impossible where almost always late or just not be reached. At the end of the documentary process and only when the image has persisted or the issue has been found is when some of the doubt is dispelled and displayed glimpses of a look, an idea captured by a camera, a self that looks at another. Pause necessary, mount to go again in search of a dynamic documentary look out when we're seeing is what is inside and inside, there is, above all, are not sure.

* This text was originally published in the 2009 catalog of the Eighth International Documentary Film Festival, EDOC

Elementary Graduation Welcome Address

Diane Arbus - a contemporary look

Diane Arbus (NY, 1923-1971) remains significant. He looked at the fact that the photographer made it clear is primarily an interpreter and that reality is not an indisputable fact. His firm settled way of seeing the need to communicate identities and close with a strong political and critical, created a body of photographs that do not opt \u200b\u200bfor the truth but rather through the territory of the revelations and searches.

images that fill us with more questions than answers. (LIC)

..........

"Nothing ever is the same as saying it was.
only recognize what I've never seen"

transvestite in his birthday party, NY, 1969

Mexican dwarf in his hotel room in New York, 1970

man sitting with bra and stockings, NYC, 1967

"I think if scrutinize the reality of a very close, if somehow, we really approached it, it becomes fantastic. It really is totally fantastic to see you well and it shows very clearly in a photograph. There's something ironic in the world and has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out the way they tried to "

young patriot with a flag, NYC, 1967

child with a toy grenade in Central Park, NYC, 1962

"I remember long ago when I started shooting I thought there were many people horrible in the world and it would be terribly hard to photograph them all so if photographing some kind of general human being, everyone would recognize. Something like what they call the common man or something. It was Lisette Model, my teacher, I finally said that the more specific you are, the more general will "

young man and his pregnant wife in the Park "Washington Square" NYC
, 1965

"Some photos are tentative forays without your knowing it. They become methods. It is important to make bad photos, serve to one recognizes what is different and what has not been done before. I do recognize something you have not seen in a way that you will recognize when you see it again "

identical twins, Roselle, NJ, 1967

"The Chinese say that one goes from boredom to fascination easily and I think that's true. I have never chosen a subject for what it means for me or what I think of him. One has only to choose a subject, which it believes will only work if enough "

young man with curlers in her home on the street" West 20th, NYC, 1966

"One thing I encountered at the outset is that one does not put in a picture that's out or vice versa, what comes out is what goes down. I've never taken a picture I wanted to do, always better or worse "

Texts and captions taken from: Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph

Tmobile Text Messaging History Online

Lucho Mejia political status of the act of seeing

by Francois Laso
(text read the book launch of Lucho Mejia in the Ministry of Culture )

GOOD NIGHT, I have been asked to speak to Luis Mejia of your picture but most of what it means for someone like me, collect legacy of his work.

will appeal to my memories and inevitably talk about images that are not here. Talk about some photos that even today, I'm not sure if I see extraordinary because of the image on the retina and from there to the memory, there is an unfathomable that manages travel and perverted, or because my own perceptual experience of this city repeats itself from the sixties, is founded in every corner, with photos I found in a infotografiable afternoon at the home of Don Lucho.

And that's why there are "old", as stated in art schools, outdated, but wise, to illuminate the journey of perception of reality to the retina and its background to the memory, speech, language and, again, we're lucky, photography. For a photographer like me, confused form with substance and Cartier-Bresson with the Holy Spirit (and then I did good atheist), discover a celestial and heavenly edition published by the Central Bank on struggle cheek and published in 1989, explained in my the trappings of spirit, devotion to the saint and the content of the photograph.

Women the door of the Church of San Francisco. Quito, 1982. TITLE: APPOINTMENT.

Luis "Tinta China" Castañeda. Boxer - coach. Coliseo Julio Cesar Hidalgo.
Quito, 1984: TITLE: LUIS "INK CHINA" CASTANEDA

If something is missing in the young, from photography, is l a possibility of a link to our images of the past . The look is a construction, but when you know how we have been glimpsed as a picture, as we have been regarded, foolishly repeat the same image to death. No, we reinterpreted, look at us again. That unhappiness is deeply linked to the uses that might makes subtly images. Does not prevent us to do: prevent the meet. The much-battered subject of our lack of memory has nothing to do with an alleged and extraordinary ability to forget (as we constantly repeat it) but with a constant practice of hiding from the media, state and files. There, from such practices, a reality more important than others: beautiful landscapes uninhabited and hide and supersedes multicolored cotidianidades less exotic and picturesque. If you see

these pictures carefully, learn from Don Lucho, meaning the distance. The exact space that exists between the photographer and the world body's ethics, bioethics ... Gombrich says. Learn to see like a big, SEE HOW MEJIA: keen eye for photography is not only politics, the political condition of the act of seeing . Is that the struggle is a be-eye. Or, if you will, a being-red, to me, in these pictures here exhibited less talk of a city as any in the sixties in Latin America, this is the haunting story of recent times, and much, much more of a city built from the look , in some sixty unique and special for our ... this is the picture of a photographer and that is far more revealing than a horrible building, half constructed, on pastures Iñaquito.

That is easy to say but not easy: The paper holds all ... a non-negative.

Otavalo Indian pending a hearing with a judge in the courthouse
. Quito, 1966. TITLE: THE PLEASURE

Children in Colonial Quito sector. 1966. TITLE: THE GUM.

In the sixties there were 3 coups Velasco Ibarra, Arosemena Arosemena other more, a certain Yerovi and Velasco again. On a Caribbean island, a revolution, there was a moon rock, as far as absurd and there was also a memorable roll no virgin. And it was all that and nothing else. Mejia set out to rescue the seemingly insignificant value and dignity of the, obviously, trampled. And every light his aesthetic search testified marginalized with an incredible consistency (aesthetic and philosophical) and a deep sense of distance: Mejía, the political act of seeing, is at the same time photographing and being photographed . If nothing else is learned from Don Lucho, is its ability to blend hallucinatory in and with the other and if one more thing, one of many, one learns of Don Lucho, is that photography is an act of compassion.

The paper holds all ... a non-negative.

Builders doing the excavation for the foundation of the overpass
August 10th Avenues and Patria, Quito, 1969. TITLE: QUARTET

I look at the man in the midst of their struggle to survive in a hostile society, talk about your picture and talk about it. Ours is a hostile society, of the disinherited ... there are, every day and in our day, l photographs as Dolores Ochoa, Ricardo Bohorquez and Alejandro Reinoso who are daughters of those cheek .... and there is Mejía, disinherited, almost forgotten and an economy that is known ... but not spoken. Paradoxes of power and wonders of photography. The craft is learned from humility, constantly reminds me when I look Lucho Mejia, from the deep bow to reality, from its obtuse nature. We are children of the story we build and we are children of the images that we retain and remember, we are children of the politics of seeing, l photographers today you are children of Lucho Mejia.

Al TODAY him beside me deeply would be a mirror ... because today, Don Lucho, I want to be like you ...

Quito, January 14, 2008

Photos from the book Luis Mejia. Photographic collection of Ecuador.
Volume 1. Ediciones del Banco Central del Ecuador, Quito, 1989.