A trap

What pieces or projects have you been working on lately?
Lately I've been working on a project that is slowly consuming me. It is called The Beautiful and the Sublime, a title stolen from Kantian aesthetics but thrown up in the humid streets of Oaxaca, amidst gothic parties, smeared makeup, and people dancing as if the world had already ended.

It is a photoalbum, yes, but it is also a novel. Or rather: it is a trap. The story begins when a writer -one of those who return defeated from abroad with a smell of loneliness- is commissioned to write a biography about Alejandra Vidal Olmos. Yes, the same one, the one of On heroes and tombs. As if a character could have a biography. As if we all didn't already have one. But the curious thing, or the terrible thing, is that while the protagonist tries to reconstruct this Alejandra, he finds some essays written by his ex-girlfriend -also called Alejandra, also signed as A.V.- that arrived by mail while he was far away, running away from who knows what, maybe from her, maybe from himself.

The book is put together as a kind of exquisite corpse. Black and white photographs of gothic events where bodies seem to seek solace in the shadows, interspersed with chapters of that novel. And there the protagonist collapses little by little, thinking of the real Alejandra, of her essays, of the gestures he did not understand, of a book he wrote in 2020 and which she prefaced: The Beautiful and the Sublime. A book that affirmed that the fall of Satan was not a rebellion, it was an aesthetic act. That Satan was the first poet of the universe. 

This project has no redemption. Just blurred faces, cigarette smoke, crossed stories. But there is something else. The photos. Those photos that ten years from now someone will look at and say: I was there. Although in reality they were not. Although in reality we were all lost.

What did you learn (or unlearn) while working on them?
What I learned is that you need to be there, with the camera trembling in your hands, as if it were a revolver. I discovered an absurd technique, covering a part of the flash with my finger. The result is a shadow that bites the photograph, a small darkness that seems to come from another world. A visual echo. An atmosphere. An animal sleeping on the face of the subject.

But that's just the technical part. The other thing, the essential, what I learned more clearly, is that to photograph someone you have to let them talk. Let them tell you what they are afraid of. Let them laugh. Let them drink. Let them break a little. Let him forget that there is a body in the middle, a camera, a lens, a light. Then yes: the portrait ceases to be an image. It becomes a secret.

I still remember a shoot with an Afghan-American model in New Orleans. As I photographed him, he seemed to shed everything: his history, his gender, his passports. I saw him become air. And that remained in the image, or so I want to believe.

And then there's alcohol. Not as a muse, but as a broken compass. I had a streak -dangerous, yes, but also luminous in its darkness- in which I would take pictures drunk, sometimes so drunk that I would forget I had taken the shot. I would check the camera the next day like someone who finds someone else's notebook, a notebook full of visions. And sometimes I wondered: did I do this? And the answer was yes. Or no. Or someone who looked a lot like me and who only appears when you forget yourself. Like real ghosts.

What words, ideas or emotions were going through your head?
I was thinking a lot about the word “ghost”. Because every person you portray is, deep down, about to disappear. It doesn't matter if he's smiling or posing like a statue. He is in transit. He is dying a little. Just like everyone else. Photography does not stop time, that is an illusion; what it does is certify the disappearance. And that illusion was sweet and cruel. Like kissing someone knowing that he will be gone in the morning.

Sometimes I was assailed by the idea - silly, adolescent, and yet persistent - that I also wanted to be beautiful and sublime. That my life would be an image worth remembering. But that is impossible. Beauty is not inhabited, it is pursued. It is a trap. A knife in the shape of a flower.

And at night, especially on those rainy nights in Oaxaca, I felt accompanied by an ancient, broken, unrepeatable word: lost. Lost like Satan in his aesthetic fall. Lost like a photographer who falls in love with the same woman in two different bodies. Lost like someone who takes a picture knowing that in ten years someone will say I was there, and you will not know if you are lying or if you remember.

Were there any conversations, movies, music, or books that made their way into that work?
Yes, of course. Everything slips through. You work as if you were writing with the door closed, but in reality there is always someone peeping through the crack. In my case, it was The Ballad of Sexual Dependency Nan Goldin's photograph is the one that entered first, like a wound that won't close. Her photography hurts and seduces me. There is something in those sweaty bodies, in those dirty rooms, in those parties where beauty is mixed with ruin, that reminded me of my own way of looking. And of living.

Also the Sofia Coppola Archive, It was as if her cinema - so full of silences where all the screams fit - had taught me to use the flash as if it were a memory. All that remained floating while I was working. Like an atmosphere. Like a perfume that you can't get out of your clothes.

The magazine ERRR Magazine was also present. For his texts, for his spirit. That kind of lucid youth that refuses to mature, that turns sadness into an aesthetic. I read his pages like someone leafing through someone else's diary, and I found something there. A voice that said: you are not alone in not knowing who you are..

And behind all that, one step behind was my library. All those books that I have read and forgotten, that they have read to me without me knowing it. Because you don't choose your influences, your influences choose you. And suddenly you realize that you are writing with the voice of a dead man, or taking pictures with the eyes of someone you never knew. That's how it was. That's how it is.

Recommend us the Instagram account of an artist you follow, who inspires you, and tell us what you like most about their work or the way they work.
I follow a photographer from my city. I don't know her in person. Her portraits are not portraits, they are symbols. No matter who she takes the picture of, in all of them the same figure appears: the waiting, the tenderness, the trembling.

I like it because it has not lost its origin. It has not been tamed by filters or fashions that smell like nothing. It has something brutal, old. As if each image were a relic of a city that no longer exists, but that she insists on rescuing with her camera. And that, in these times, is almost a miracle.

I am sure that if I gave him any camera -the most obsolete one, one of those that one finds in the drawers of the dead-, he would give me back at least one good photo. Not technically good, but vital, broken, with soul. As if the camera were not a tool but a sleeping animal that only wakes up with it.

Your account is wolkedestages She is from here, from this city. I hope someday we will meet. And not to talk about art, nor technique, nor aesthetics. Hopefully we'll talk about something else. About the weather, about cats, about the time we almost died of love, or about anything else.