people

Lord of the fields

 

Lord of the fields

In some way I think in a baseball player, running from one… basement? to the other. I don’t know the baseball rules.

It was time to harvest I think, around here, Cocachacra, the farmers sell sugar and watermelons in the highway to the travelers and some kilometers ahead in a little town next to a river they sell shrimp pancakes. I see this scene with a bit of sadness, but it wasn’t there when I took the photograph. Actually the countryside looked quite happy that time.

The equilibrist

The equilibrist

In the elementary school I was very good in the exercise to practice equilibrium over a thin wooden beam to jump to a ring, once I was selected to practice it in public but I was so afraid that I didn’t do anything. Last weekend in the building I designed I had to walk a thin wooden board to set the formwork of a concrete beam, in one side there was five meters of a fall to concrete stairs and to the other side was a fall of ten meters to the neighbour roof. Everything withouth safety equipment…

I felt what I feel when I am lost in the cold of the nature; or climbing also without nothing more than a pair of shoes a jean a shirt and a backpack with water and a camera; or fighting to don’t die in the dangerous blocks. The life suddenly seems a wooden beam so thin and light, so fragile…

Some thoughts about street photography

see into the light

See into the light

I am thinking about street photography.  I understand about life in cities and people is important to have a reference of scale so when the composition ask it I introduce people in public spaces in the photograph. For example in this first photograph… Could you have a sense of the size of the door without the couple?

Caress of afternoon light

Caress of afternoon light

In Peru, Chile and Bolivia there is no problem in shooting in the public space of the street. It’s the space for everybody so the same way I take photographs of others I discovered others shot photographs of me. I never could forbid nobody in the street to have photographs about me, the same way I couldn’t forbid nobody to shot the façade of the buildings I designed because I designed them precisely as a contribution to the public and shared space of the city. Of course there are limits and I try that the person is not totally clear, because I’m not focused in persons but the happenings of the city.

In search of the unknown

In search of the unknown

The life in the highlands, the coast and the jungle is quite different. Usually population in touristic cities are used to photographs, commercial cities instead are the less welcome to photographs. In any case I can say that in Peru, Bolivia and Chile is allowed to take photographs in any public space.

doves

Doves

But I understand it’s not a universal way to see things. I know in continental Europe and in Quebec laws forbid photography of people, even in public space. If I would visit those places certainly I would respect the law and save my camera, but I don’t understand why the citizens of those countries have not the same problem when they visit my country and are happy to shot, as it’s nothing wrong really, every person, especially the ones with more typical costumes. Also I see their albums and they are proud to shot people in Japan or India…

contemplating

contemplating

So this is my thought. In my way to think, to feel, to express, (and according to the law of the countries I have visited and the one where I live) I know I’m doing well. I considered to delete, modify or don’t post street photography for the readers of the sensible countries but this is not a magazine. This is a personal diary, and I need to be faithful and true to myself.

I hope you can appreciate in my photographs and words how is a world different to yours, in the same way I learn from the yours. But if it’s against what your heart and mind consider correct and you are not going to change your mind then my best suggestion is to leave my space, as always honored for your time towards what I write and show. Nothing more.

color in the white world

Color in the white world

If there is an idea I try to express is my feeling that in cities we tend to be actually alone. The crowds and the cities make us living around several interactions, but in the end they reinforce our will to be ourselves. Certainly cities reinforce that will on me. In the highlands I try to live close to hills or mountains, in the coast close to the sea…

mural painted with reflections

Mural painted with reflections

There is an almost funny feeling of solitude contrasting with the idea that we walk regularly with the same people in the way to work or studies. What is more accentuated in this time where we cannot get a word with the passenger next to us without being seen as perverts but we wake up passions with the stranger that we “knew” in internet. But although sometimes it’s real mostly that’s an illusion: here we are just chains of letters. The person next to you in the street is more real.

doubt at afternoon

About shadows and thoughts

When I take these photographs I think in Hopper’s oeuvre. The reflexive loneliness of the persons. They way they never get to make eye contact closing their souls around themselves.

We sell colors

We sell colors

In Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino I also feel that strange life that is the life in the city. A carnival where people of every kind is mixed and the traditions and routines make us forget that perhaps some of the things we do aren’t healthy or logical. For example one of the reasons I don’t see my University former mates is because the meetings have to be done drinking several bottles of beer… but it’s the life in cities.

is it truth

Is it truth?

And I like to think in cities as living animals, giant and living according to their own rhythm. Indifferent to the little and ephemeral people moving around their bodies.

Time to go.

nice day for a walk

nice day for a walk

The long wait

The long wait

I saw this lady in a small city while I was traveling to Ilo city in the coast, with eyes in a patient waiting. By the way the lady is working, I think measuring the time and frequency of busses I clarify this because she’s not in poverty, she’s a lady with clean clothes. It’s sad when photographers from our capital likes to shot ancient people and show them as homeless (and sometimes tourists as well :S) even worse: they exaggerate the wrinkles and the contrast to exploit a image of misery that didn’t exist in first place.

A vast whiteness closing around the world

A vast whiteness closing around the world

Since I was a kid, four years old, I always have seen strange and little people in the countryside; as always I’m just playing and running and suddenly appears this little sir or lady, I start to talk but then just see with their old eyes. Curiously that just happened when I was alone. Since then I almost think that citizens and peasants live in different worlds, they cannot see us or perhaps we exist in an inevitable way like the early star at twilight of the cloud traveling lazily across the blue. And to us they are like persons always walking the infinite landscape, staring to who knows what, like they were three hundred years old and still had eight thousand years more to contemplate the slow life in middle of the domesticated nature.

The frontier were our worlds collide and we actually talk is the market.

Bus to the sun

Bus to the sun

Great part of my photographs are shot in buses. Mostly from a district to another; regularly from a city to another one, a few times from one country to another.

This is one local to go in the same city. The buses are quite informal in their service so then can be cheap. A ride just go for 35 cents of dollar and foreigners say that it’s quite different to another countries where they have a higher cost, and are more organized. Once I went to Chile and certainly that was different, the driver gave even tickets and the speed was so slow and it just stopped in signaled places. I understand that’s the usual and our country is in that aspect a chaotic experience.