For once I am really sorry to have missed the deadline for submitting my work to a photo exhibition.

 

Fact is, I just was not aware of it until the morning of January first 2012, when I was trying to keep sea water out of my boots while photographing the Coney Island Polar Bear Event and I bumped into fellow photographer Harvey Stein.

 

Harvey told me that a couple of his pictures of Occupy Wall Street had been selected for the exhibition and also broke to me the bad news about the closure of the submission period.

 

Yes, I am talking about Occupy photo show at the South Street Seaport Museum, opening on January 26^th.

 

One of the reasons I would have liked to have the opportunity to submit my OWS photography is because I worked extensively at it, traveling almost on a daily basis to capture events and faces down at Zuccotti Park, and this was mostly out of my own interest about what was happening there and only occasionally as a paid work assignment.

 

Every day I broadcasted a few OWS photos on my Instagram and Flickr feeds, receiving positive comments from the four corners of the world, especially from people who were glad to see different and, in their words, less biased images from what, especially at the beginning of the protest, they felt was a limited and negative coverage by the mainstream media in their countries.

 

I must admit though, as I was shooting at Zuccotti Park, while trying to maintain a detached, objective, photojournalistic point of view, as I have always done throughout my career, I experienced an increasing sympathy towards the issues being voiced and felt like I would personally stand behind many of them.

 

In other words, I felt that, being a photojournalist or not, I also certainly belonged to a discontent 99% of a nation that had rapidly ditched its highest values, attributes and dreams in the last decade and where a reality check about social equality, civil liberties and human rights was long overdue.

 

I sent one of my photos, depicting a young pregnant protester, who had written the words “for his future” on her belly, to the New York Times and I was glad to see they featured it in their LENS blog and Facebook pages, provoking thousands of comments, ”likes” and shares for days on end.  Certainly the best outcome for any editorial photograph is to stir a heartfelt dialogue and I was proud to see that my image did just that.

 

Anyway, despite my quite diligent “social media presence” I just missed out on the submission deadline (and I hear I was not the only one) so you won’t see any of my pictures there, but I am sure we’ll see the remarkable and interesting works of many other photographers.

 

After all, to me, the most important thing is not being personally featured in this exhibit but the very existence of the exhibit itself. That is the unmistakable proof of the social importance of the events those photographs report about a decisive moment in the history of our nation.

 

I am sure there’ll be more protests, more occupations, more discontent in the future and I am looking forward to them, as a photographer and as a citizen.

 

Meanwhile, I am looking forward to enjoying the Occupy photo show, meeting fellow photographers and exchanging experiences.

 

I encourage you to do the same.

 

 More OWS photos HERE

 

 

It was with sadness and trepidation that I entered a nondescript, crumbling building, to explore the dusty, moldy remnants of the last existing movie theatre in San Juan de la Maguana.

I found myself in a large deserted hall where the empty, rotting chairs immediately reminded me of gravestones in a graveyard. There was no electricity, so, helping myself with a flashlight, I climbed all the way up to the projection booth.

I was suddenly transported back in time, at the beginning of my career, when those projectors, film reels and valve audio amplifiers were still in common use.

In the spooky silence of the abandoned projection booth, where the equipment had been first cannibalized and then forgotten for over a decade, if I closed my eyes I could still hear the projector noise, see the tubes warming up, the carbon rod heating, the light shining through the small square window in front of the lens to entertain the young and the old in a welcome and popular social gathering, similar and probably even more eagerly attended, than a Sunday church service.

 

 

Cinema was society, it meant learning and being entertained together, in this small Dominican town near the Haitian border. Cinema was something fueling discussions and recollections for days on end, until a new movie title would come to town.

As a cinema lover (and as a movie-maker too) I felt a great deal of sadness thinking that such a small border town used to have five different movie theatres up until a couple of decades ago and then, one after the other, they all disappeared, theoretically superseded and replaced by cable TV and the internet.

I felt that what was dramatically lost here was the actual experience of cinema, the celebratory and powerful images from all over the world, the Hollywood stars, the special events, occasions way out of reach of our everyday life, popping out from a big screen, blaring from the speakers and filling the eyes of an entire community, physically and emotionally gathered, eating snacks and candies, joking with each other, sometimes even making out, in the darkness of a movie theatre.  

Absolutely nothing, today, can or will replace that experience.

After photographing the place to the limit of my physical capabilities, choking on dust and covered in mold, I set off to find someone who would be able to still remember this forever lost “Cinema experience” and tell me about it.

I came across Mercedes, who still vividly recalled the beauty of it all.

One of the funniest stories she told me was about this little truck, driving around town with a megaphone on the roof, announcing the latest “Jim Bond” (James Bond) movies, emphasizing the action packed story and describing Bond’s “fire-vomiting” pistol!!

Or her recollection of “Sido”, the projectionist, who was widely known in town but recently died, poor and alone, like a forgotten piece of broken celluloid in the dust of the cinema floor.

Progress has now arrived, even in San Juan de La Maguana, land of supernatural voodoo possessions and popular heroes such as Olivorio Mateo, who was called “God on earth” and lead a messianic movement at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Progress is here to stay, while, looking at my photographs of those old abandoned movie projectors and disused equipment, I can’t help but reflect, as if I was watching a trembling, scratchy, badly focused projection from my soul, on what has been gained and what has been lost with this so-called “progress”.

But then I hear a snap.

The film reel has broken again.

 

Click HERE to see the MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION of this story

 

In the thirty years I have spent as a photojournalist my lens focused on a great diversity of subjects and situations. I think I can safely affirm that some pictures are easier than others to be shown to generic audiences and to receive praise.

There are images that, if interestingly photographed, carry a “built in assurance” of good reception from the general public, for example photos of dressed up children (even starving ones), conventionally beautiful, beautifully lit and scantily dressed men and women, suggestive landscapes, celebrities, puppies, kittens etc.

Other subjects have some difficulty in reaching and pleasing an audience, even on the “free” World Wide Web and very often they end up appealing to specific groups of people the image itself had no intention of targeting at all when it was taken.

As it happens to many professional photographers I too have shot several nude studies during my career. While I was based in Europe, my nude photos were basically just another chapter in my portfolio and triggered some interest, which sometimes led to exhibitions and publications.

Since I moved to the USA, about twenty years ago, I have increasingly found that my nude images could bring me trouble and have reluctantly decided to self-censor that branch of my photographic work.

Here in the US of A photographing a naked body appears to carry a dangerous stigma.

While the media and Hollywood are able to relentlessly bombard us all with gruesome images of disturbing violence and make millions of dollars with those images, a mere nipple or a hint of pubic hair could quite easily land an image-maker in trouble or even in jail in the USA today.

Perhaps one of the most anti-nudity censorship attitude in the USA can be found on the so-called “social media”.

Just a few days ago a good friend of mine, a brilliant photographer himself, had the “imprudence” or the “lack of judgment" to innocently post on Facebook a photo of his infant daughter, candidly sitting on a rug and reading a bedtime story to her doll.

But horror!! The little girl wasn’t wearing any clothes!! (The pic was actually taken in the Caribbean, where clothes aren’t always a strict necessity, especially for young children) and although the picture had absolutely no graphical elements depicting “forbidden areas” of the body, the “nudity police” at Facebook immediately censored it and my friend was bitterly reprimanded.

So, my friend first tried to dispute the removal of his image with the Facebook “nudity police”, to no avail. 

Then he posted a public comment on his Facebook page about his indignation at this rather silly and overzealous Facebook censorship and, while I refrained from commenting (having been censored myself all over the social media before- for “safer” –non child – partial nudity - I wasn’t certainly surprised to see this happening) a few of his other friends did.

It was interesting to follow the thread and feeling in agreement with quite a few comments, including my friend’s own.

One of the comments said: “….Facebook is like a gathering in somebody's salon in the eyes of the law. If the person hosting the salon says you can't do or say something, no matter how silly their interdiction, well, it's their house and they're the boss of everybody”. 

My friend did not agree and replied: “…well I am not sure that analogy applies. This private company is providing a service to the public. It makes money off that service. It has a right to ask members to agree to rules and regulations that do not infringe on a client's rights, but the fact that Facebook operates without any system of redress or transparency, allows for members to make anonymous accusations, does not deign to explain its actions or make clear the grounds for its actions (other than refer the member to their policy statement which does not answer the question at all) and ultimately does not vouchsafe its members' right to due process, seems to me to be a violation of the law. If an employee or a client of a private company is wronged, the law requires that the company justify its actions or be liable to penalties. I see no reason why Facebook should be exempt, especially when one considers that the company now controls the flow of information for billions of people. All organs of public communication are subject to the same laws as the rest of the nation, why should Facebook be allowed to act unilaterally and without regard for the rights of its users?”

While conceptually I strongly believe in what my friend is stating there, sadly, I also tend to agree with the “gathering in somebody's salon" analogy.

Call me cynical, but I have extensive personal experience, that in this post-GW Bush corporate America, a private company providing a service to the public and making money off that service can indeed increasingly infringe on a client's rights without any system of redress or transparency. Things have gotten out of hand over here, to a great extent, perhaps thanks to the decreased scrutiny by the mainstream media, which in the past could be a somewhat feared social watchdog and has lately become a mere mouthpiece of corporate propaganda.

That’s why I try to be very careful about what I post on my heavily “privately set up “ Facebook account.

Make no mistake, we are indeed socializing in a weird, voluble, big brother family salon here, full of little publicized, ever-changing “privacy rules” and people we barely know or don’t know at all.

Another interesting comment to my friend’s original post was: “…[I] remember Sally Mann's run-in with the art community over her images of her naked children. It took her years to deal with the fallout of that. Second, kiddie porn is such a tungsten-hot topic that anybody who is in touch with nude children or anybody charged with child porn, tends to overreact. …… So while this may indeed be censorship, in the long run they may be doing you a favor to remove it. Finally, there is a subculture of people in the US (maybe elsewhere in the world) who are crazed opponents on this subject. They are so crazy they will go to any end to stop people who appear to have anything to do with nude children. I am sure FB has run into them before, and just doesn't need to deal with their ire”.

All food for thoughts, isn’t it?

Anyway, let me digress a bit and tell you about my own bruises and scars about my nude photos.

My (paid) Flickr account was restricted as “unsafe” four times in the past three years.

I was able to talk them into revoking their decision by selecting all those photos that even remotely could pose a threat to Flickr’s concept of “social decency” and self-restrict their view. This means they don’t appear on my public stream anymore and only those members who decide to remove the “safe view” filter from their accounts can now view them.

By enforcing this self-censorship I probably made Flickr happy enough to un-block my (paid) account but I also unintentionally solicited a constant stream of real pornographers and various other shady characters hitting on my pictures….sometimes thousands a day. 

As I noticed all this unusual activity on my stream I took the time to verify what kind of images these people posted in their own accounts and found myself in front of a barrage of explicitly sexual photos, sadly with no artistic or creative virtues whatsoever…basically mere, squalid, at times quite objectionable, pornography.

So, these pornographers where hitting on my nude studies to enrich their kinky collections and photo exchanges. 

I blocked them all, several thousands to this day, but they kept coming, like little Pac-Men (Porn-Men?) in a crazed video-game…..

In the end the only solution was to restrict all my nude studies on Flickr as private.

Which means no one can see them, but me.

Which means: what’s the point to upload them onto Flickr to get constructive criticism and interesting comments from fellows photographers in the first place?.

Which means… I might as well bury all those images in my hard-drives….. !

Which probably means we live in a truly sick world where art might as well rhyme with fart.

Ok, now let me get to the bottom line, more horror stories shall be re-lived in my next post, perhaps…

The bottom line is somewhat abstract: I read Orwell’s 1984 when I was a teenager for the first time and many times after that. In this lifetime I have come to experience “doublespeak” ( and doubletruths, doublevalues, doublestandards etc. etc.)on my own skin, on my creativity, on my sense of reality, on my social environment, almost on a daily basis, especially in the last couple of decades.

2+2= 5 for some, for others it is 4 and for others might be 6 or whatever.

Yes, whatever.

Gone for good are the days when you could make and present something at face value. 

Maybe those days never even existed.

Gone are the days where accountability was a necessary, unequivocal concept that applied to the majority of society, including public and private companies.

A lot of people I know are quite enthusiastic about social networking, about finding old and new “friends”, building relationships, being socially and culturally validated through a computer screen, which depends on an apparently inexhaustible supply of electricity and electronic transmissions.

 I am not immune to all this and I do not hide behind an unsustainable neo-primitivism either.

You can find my name all over the Internet, you can Google me, see some of my pictures on several photo-sharing platforms. I own three websites and this blog.

I use the internet on a daily basis, mostly for work and research.

But make no mistake, I am and I remain suspicious as well as try to exercise extreme caution in my “social media” interactions and in the content I post there. I have an inescapable inner feeling, telling me that everything I post, or even comment, could produce more harm than good, to me and to others, whether I like it or not.

It has happened to me before, in several occasions.

I also remain suspicious of the actual usefulness of a daily full immersion in the web, the high-speed highway we think we drive from this keyboard. I keep having the feeling that someone else is actually at the wheel and we just toy ourselves with a dummy driving device while sitting on the driver’s lap.

It can be extremely easy for anyone to develop a screen addiction, wasting days, energy and creativity in front of this screen, trying to fill a void, a sense of loneliness that only real people, real social efforts and exchanges could help us fill, not emails, text messages and banalities exchanged in someone else’ electronic salon.

Moreover, I find it very difficult to “be myself” on the web, as a human being, a thinker, an artist.

Often in our social activities we need to put up a mask, to reassure a client, to soothe and mellow the creative process of a project and so on. On the web it is the same, only more subtle and potentially more difficult (and dangerous) because we don’t necessarily know who is standing in front of us and we cannot elaborate a working strategy based on human psychology and social common sense.

Most of all, I never forget who is the boss of the “social networks”. And it’s not me.

At best, I am just a “user” of this Internet thing.

Yes, a “user”- paradoxically exactly the same term we use to define a drug addict!

By the way, the internet can also be a useful tool, especially for research and wide data access, but we must be aware that this constant electronic connectivity is moving much faster than our learning curve and like all things it easily lends itself to abuse and misuse.

My personal recommendation would be towards using the Internet in moderation, like most things, from alcohol to spicy food, and never, ever post anything you don’t want the whole world to see, comment on, steal and reproduce.

In order to end up this already disproportionately long rant, which, by the way, brutally digressed from the initial topic of nudity and censorship to awkwardly land onto an extremely complex concept of social media, big brothers and my personal mistrust in humanity at large, I shall say one last thing about the original topic that sums it all: if you don’t want to have trouble in America today you are better off posting a picture of a dismembered fetus than the picture of a nipple.

Alternatively, stick with puppies and kittens.

Good night and good luck.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE MY PRESS CREDENTIALS ? : ..... of course my thirty years of press credentials just don't fit around my neck.... so I am just wearing a few for entertaining my friends. However, I also took this picture to comment on a serious problem that is not being addressed properly and re-occurred yesterday during the eviction of Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park, here in New York City : A MEDIA BLACKOUT. If we believe to Mayor Bloomberg affirmation that he ordered to cordon off two city blocks around the perimeter to avoid people (and journalists alike) getting hurt during the eviction operation, why was the airspace above the area also restricted to TV network helicopters ? Reality check guys....!! the Media is almost entirely constrained and manipulated by the government (read Corporations) nowadays .... a press pass is not worth the plastic is printed on.... sad but true. Take it from me,

I have been around for a while !

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To see more images I shot about the OCCUPY WALL STREET protest here in New York City, please click HERE

As much as I love photographing with my iPhone, I often feel frustrated by its poor performance in low light conditions.

So, the other day I put together a little rig using bits and bobs I found around my studio, accumulated in many years of image making

 

The bits and bobs I used, perfectly visible in the pics, are:

 

1)   An old medium format flash bracket

2)   A dinky swivel with cold shoe attachments

3)   A battery operated (4 AA cells) LED light panel

4)   A cheap iPhone cradle for my already ancient 3Gs iPhone

 

 

Well, I must say I am pretty happy with the results. The rig is very lightweight and extremely portable, allowing me to shoot photos and video with the iPhone both vertically and horizontally.

 

The light I used is an old, dead cheap LED panel that won’t be of much use in illuminating a whole train station nor a face backlit by the sun, but will give you a pretty decent fill for a portrait taken in a dark environment.

 

The other positive attribute of this rig is that you can position the light to camera (iPhone) left, elevate it above or push it below at various angles, courtesy of a dinky swivel I attached between the grip and the light panel.

 

If a want a more diffused light I use a cut square of quarter scrim but, as the light doesn’t heat up (the beauty of LEDs) you could even use your handkerchief!

 

Using a stronger diffusion (yes, I tried a mini soft box, a small translucent umbrella etc..) simply takes too much humpft out of the light so you might as well foggetaboutit.

 

Today I was at Adorama with my dear friend iPhoneographer extraordinaire Sion Fullana who was buying the bits and bobs to build a similar rig for himself. A very polite gentleman from Africa got interested in my contraption and asked me if he could photograph it as he saw a great marketing potential for it.

 

I declined and asked him not to photograph my homemade device.

As I got home, thinking about it, I felt that was a silly behavior on my part.

 

At this point in my life and career I mainly pursue professional gratification from the images I humbly try to create everyday. Unfortunately, I am not rich, but I do have food in my plate and I am blessed with health and love in my life.

 

So, why should I be cagey and worried about sharing my knowledge? Is my little invention going to make me rich and famous? Is marketing this contraption what I want to spend whatever time I’ve got left on this earth doing?

 

I don’t think so. I want to keep taking pictures.

 

Photographing, telling visual stories, until I can steadily hold a camera in my hands.

Then, I’ll get a tripod (!).

 

 

Knowledge is power but I think it is a good thing to share that power so that it can benefit others and not only yourself.

 

I guess I have been fooling myself for a moment with that increasingly popular and common attitude of pitiless copy-righteousness and scruple-less capitalism that I deplore on a daily basis in far too many aspects of the society I live in.

 

Copyrights, model releases, location releases work for hire contracts, corporate espionage, legal disclaimers, trademarks are ephemeral yet cruelly limiting concepts and situations I have repeatedly encountered in my life and in my career.

 

And I always despised them, or at least the right side of my brain always did!

 

So, tonight, perhaps as an apology to that polite African gentleman who I forbid to photograph my lighting contraption, I publish this on the web for all to see.

 

Perhaps you can “steal” this idea from me and get very rich. I wish you well.

 

But most of all, my biggest hope is that you’ll get better-exposed images when shooting with your iPhone in the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

A work in progress, perhaps to distract my attention from various heat-waves, a failing economy, the lack of air conditioning in my old apartment and indeed my personal, frustrated longing for a long vacation at the seaside.

 

Also, a photographic voyage in the less explored neighborhoods of Manhattan and the Bronx focused onto all those thousands of people who, like me and worst than me, get stuck in the boiling city during the summer.

 

The lack of a holiday home, lack of money, work commitments or, ever increasingly, unemployment epidemics, are the culprits of our sweating and swearing on the melting urban asphalt.

 

We’d love to get out of these stuffy tenements, to exchange our old and smelly apartments for a mountain breeze and the sweet shade of the palm trees, but we can’t.

 

We are stuck here.

 

We fight back the heath and the sweltering desolation of this disenfranchised geography with fans and air conditioning, trying not to think about the monstrous consequent electricity bills, we struggle to reclaim the refreshing fun we would rather have at the beach by opening up hydrants and showering amongst passing cars.

 

Summer in the city.

 

Photographically speaking I decided the best instrument to document the above scenarios was going to be my iPhone.

Small, lightweight and unobtrusive was the way to go.

 

I started crossing from Manhattan into the Bronx everyday over the 207^th Street bridge, sweating profusely each and every step.

 

I then decided to have a daily feed (or stream) of my photographic explorations using what has recently become one of the most successful photo-sharing sites, especially amongst iPhone photographers: Instagram.

 

Instagram, a relatively new mobile photo-sharing site, is rapidly increasing its popularity, nonchalantly surpassing other long established sites, such as Flickr, due to its ease of use and its phenomenal sharing speed, enabling you to shoot, process your image and share it directly from your mobile device in a matter of seconds.

 

There is a vibrant and growing community of professional photographers and amateurs alike using Instagram who share their work and relentlessly comment on each other photos, leave constructive feedback and follow their favorite streams.

 

The Instagram experience indeed resonates with the concepts of immediacy, accessibility and portability at a global level.

 

I thought it would be interesting to experiment sharing on Instagram my “summer in the city” project, so I began posting three- four photographs everyday.

 

Almost immediately I received great, positive feedback and interesting comments from people who enjoyed my work as far away as Japan, Spain, Italy and Australia, to mention a few.

 

Obviously, I am focusing on a particular face of the summer metropolis and some of my photographs depict underprivileged subjects sweating away in tough and broken neighborhoods, but I also try to show the fun that can be had in the summer streets, as well as the irony and the surreal, timeless outlook of certain scenarios I come across.

 

The most popular chapter of this work I posted on Instagram has been what I titled “Hydrant Wars” where I was able, thanks again to the stealth quality of my iPhone camera, to depict children and adults shooting each other with the refreshing, high power water jet from many illegally opened Fire Department hydrants.

 

Not only I was surprised about the level of close up intimacy I was able to achieve shooting with an iPhone but I also marveled, looking back at many shots I had taken, about the true and encouraging sense of community (and clean, joyous, albeit a bit transgressive, fun) transpiring from some of those photographs.

 

Of course both my iPhone and I often got soaking wet while doing this.

And I hereby report that we both survived and rather enjoyed it!

 

 

 

Using a brand new service Blurb recently introduced, allowing you to compose your book by directly uploading photos from your Instagram stream, I published this limited edition book about my summer street photography with an iPhone. The proceeds from the book sale will go to a charity of my choice.

 

Check it out.

 

I just received a few copies and I was truly impressed with the image quality they were able to deliver in print using such miniscule photo files.

 

You are welcome to  follow my stream on Instagram (stream name: magneticart).

I upload new pictures everyday.

 

 

 

IT AIN'T OVER TILL IT'S OVER....

 

 

 

Stealing images in the street.

 

Last week I was interviewed by filmmaker Eric De Fino in the making of what promises to be a very interesting documentary about the worldwide explosion of iPhone photography and “iPhoneographers”.

 

Conducting the interview was Sion Fullana, an incredibly talented young photographer and a dear friend of mine. Sion has an uncommon talent for “seeing” through his lens and he is able to tell complex, poignant and strongly poetic stories with just one frame. His work has already gained millions of followers on the web.  Sion is often featured by international media, and rightly so, as one of the leading artists in the upcoming “iphoneography movement”.

 

My interview happened just a few days after I attended an interesting presentation at one of the Apple stores, here in New York City, where another prominent iPhone photographer, Jim Darling, was talking about his work.

 

 While admiring stunning examples of his street portraiture, I listened with interest to Jim explaining his approach and workflow. He said that he tends to establish a “rapport” with all of his subjects and often ends up befriending them and keeping in touch after portraying them through his iPhone. 

 

I find this approach very interesting and admirable, something that over the long time I have been photographing people I was only seldom able to do, probably due to my inner social predisposition and three decades spent covering hard news.

 

As I wrote before and explained on Eric De Fino’s  video interview last week, one of the biggest assets of shooting in the street with an iPhone is its stealth ability, giving me the gift of invisibility.

 

Increasingly, over the years, I felt encumbered by carrying a conventional looking camera and having to shove it in people faces in order to get my shot. A camera, by now, is undoubtedly a social weapon in many people eyes. Often, if not always, when in front of a lens we put on a mask, we adjust our facial expressions, we compose ourselves along the “appropriate” canons we think are pertinent based on popular concepts of beauty, composure, fashion and photography.

In a world relentlessly and brutally influenced by the mass media I must admit I also find it increasingly difficult to overtly present myself as an image-maker.

 

Then, there is the issue of gaining permission to record and use an image: a grey area, a labyrinth of custom tailored copyright laws deciding who owns what, who can use what, based more on corporate power than common sense and social fairness. These laws are usually quite flexible and modifiable, depending on who you are, who your friends are and the size of you bank account.

 

Then, there is the issue of privacy.

I am well aware, ad so you should be, that the establishment is lawfully (?) recording my and everybody else’s image, countless times a day, for law enforcement purposes.

 

What is being done with this legal espionage, ranging from security cameras on most buildings to nude x-ray scans at airports, who gets to see  these images, if they are stored, for how long and where, remains a well known mystery and an uncomfortable yet widely accepted reality.

Frankly, at this point in history I don’t think I can endorse or exceedingly worry about, in my photographic work, upon a concept of “image ownership”, as this is otherwise ignored, overlooked and manipulated at will in modern society.

 

Lastly, there is the issue of commercializing your photos, which can inhibit the process of making a picture from the start, whenever adequate compensation for the subject is not available / contemplated or if your work is not preemptively validated and commissioned.

This brings me to the subtitle of this short essay: “stealing images in the street”.

 

Perhaps I am a thief.  And the iPhone is my evil enabler.

 

But…hey, I am a good guy at heart, really…. by choice or by necessity.

 

Anyway, for the arguments sake let’s say I steal images in the street.

 

If I steal images I surely do it in a Robin Hood-esque fashion.

 

If I steal something, I steal from the unknown and unexplored territory of complete strangers’s psyche, from their unnoticed and often unnoticeable social facades.

I steal images that perhaps no one would ever even consider stealing for their apparent uselessness and un-interestingness.

 

I steal these photos, often randomly, to manipulate them through my visual creative intuition and give them back, as a message in a bottle (the bottle being the web, the message my artistic sensibility) to the very people I took them from and in the same fashion I acquired them: randomly and at no cost.

So, what is the purpose of the exercise?

 

To celebrate the ordinary and to discover how extraordinary it might actually be or become.

 

Let me say it now: art does not always mean money. Or at least, for me, it doesn’t.

 

My most enjoyable time is during the creative process of making an image.

 

Selling, marketing, having my image validated by art critics never really interested me very much and, whenever I look at photographic work being auctioned today for several million dollars, I think I understand even better why it doesn’t.

So I should say that stealing these photos is mainly part of an inner, intellectual research on the plethora of unstudied imagery surrounding me.

 

In a society obsessed with wealthy celebrities, where how interesting you are is often synonymous of how well connected to the “right” people you are or how much validation you have been able to acquire through your social skills and not who you actually are, I am fascinated by the “man in the street” the perfect stranger, filling your field of vision for just an instant, never to be seen again.

 

I try to capture that image, celebrate it, explore it and perhaps interpret it as deeply as possible by fixing it into a unique photographic frame.

Fact is I need to “steal” these images.

 

I need my subjects to be unaware of my presence as not to jeopardize the genuine attributes of their face and body expressions.

 

I am not the first photographer embarking in this type of research and I won’t be the last.

However, last nigh, coming home from yet another street iPhone-photography adventure in NYC, while downloading to a hard drive my catch of the day (which I had already post processed on the subway train back) I perused a very popular photo website and came across this article.

 

Aside from the fact that I don’t make money with my street photography, the article started to make me feel somewhat unethical in my approach to it.

However, I quickly realized that the real problem here is all about the money.

 

If a prestigious gallery or museum was to decide to exhibit and sell my street photos for large amounts of money I do think that would automatically reduce my privileges as an “invisible” photographer.

 

The point that makes my invisibility ethical is that it does not infringe on my subjects rights to make a living from a commercial use of their image, as I don’t make a living from the commercial use of their images in the first place.

So, we might say that my street photography can be defined as an “innocuous intellectual and visual experiment” of a philosophically complex renaissance man’s mind.

What would I do if tomorrow my street images start selling for millions of dollars?

 

I would probably have to continue acquiring them in the same unobtrusive, stealth way (I see no way around that) but I would also try, just out of sheer civility, to get in touch with my subjects and offer them a monetary compensation. Failing that, I would probably establish a fund or donate to charities the unallocated amounts, in case I am unable to track down all my unknowing models.

Anyway, as I keep enjoying my photography, in the streets and elsewhere, I don’t worry too much about becoming rich and famous and facing this kind of problems right now.

 

What I do worry about is the ever increasing, paranoid, legal, social, financial and pseudo-ethical implications that get piggybacked to everything we do creatively and artistically, the frightening paperwork, legal battles and anxiety attacks about a photograph, a musical tune, a literary work.

Sometimes I feel that in the world today, copyright issues are becoming not only more difficult to implement but also a dangerous, counterproductive and counterintuitive force, blocking and constraining the immediacy of the creative process and the unpredictability of the artistic mind.  

The disastrous consequences of this could well mean the death of creativity and spontaneity for their own sake, something that the careful eye might notice is already happening in way too many aspects of modern living.

Moreover, can we still seriously expect to own the rights to our own image when we almost don’t expect anymore to own the rights to privacy in a public place, to a free health care, to decent living standards, to an affordable education?

Probably not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The difference between true and untrue.

(Reflections on trance and possession while researching Vudu ceremonies in the Dominican Republic)

 

 

This is the question that will follow most of us from our infancy till the very day of our death.

And what is the answer?

 

 What makes us make up our minds about a person’s words or actions, about a particular event, about a mystery and its possible explanation or acceptance?

 

1)     Our lifelong, ever-changing, accumulated personal experience

2)     Our cultural / academic baggage

3)     The influence of the people surrounding us

4)     The influence and strength of the very person(s) trying to convince us that what they say or do is true

5)     Our willingness (or lack of) to believe that what we experience is true (faith).

6)     The final result, or rather the personal conclusions we draw once all is said and done, when the play is over and we can observe, from a distance, the plausibility of the facts and re-assess what actually happened.

I sat down to write these reflections after several years of study and field research in the mystic and mysterious world of spiritual possessions, healings, offerings and petitions, at the core of the religious and magic manifestations of the vudu ceremony in the Dominican Republic.

 During a vudu ceremony one or more persons are possessed by one (or several) Lwa, a supernatural entity, a spiritual being, a Saint. The possessed, the Medium (”Caballo “or “Servidor de Misterio”), incarnating the spirit, temporarily acquires specific powers in order to heal, counsel, resolve, heart, financial and even law matters the petitioners submit to them.

 

The “Theatrical performance” involved in a spiritual trance is an extremely subtle and controversial phenomenon to ascertain. As each Lwa possessing a human being has his/her own subjective qualities, speaking in a specific way (e.g. San Santiago speaks militarily, Santa Marta la Dominadora speaks a mixture of Spanish and Creole, Papa Legba speaks rudely and often swears etc.), walking in a specific way, asking for specific drinks or foods, the skeptical observer could be inclined to think that, contrary to the popular belief (when a person “comes back” from being possessed does not recall anything that happened), the Medium does not completely loses touch with his/her earthy self but rather adapts it to the calling of a specific Lwa based on an embedded knowledge, through oral tradition, of the peculiarities of the spirit supposedly manifesting through his/her body.

So, is the possessed Medium embodying the spirit based on a cultural/ traditional interpretation rather than a genuine psychophysical incarnation?

 

This is hard to say. How genuine a possession looks can also be a matter of the right choreography and congregational concentration. At times, I have witnessed very unconvincing possessions, especially when the social stage was unfocused and “secularly” distracted with cell phones ringing, loud background music or overwhelming traffic noise.

Other times, when the possession happened in a strongly connected environment of spiritual unity, that seemed to reinforce tenfold the veridicality of the medium embodying the Lwa.

I am inclined to think that the most rational explanation goes back to the very core of religion.

Believing is a choice.

A choice motivated by multiple social and cultural factors but mainly by our inner predisposition.

The existence of the soul has not been proved, yet, in medical terms.

Nevertheless many believe that any bodily affliction is dependent on a pre-existing affliction of the soul and that healing the body results more difficult, if not impossible, without first healing the soul.

Moreover, if the existence of the soul is not certain and if, let’s say you are extremely skeptical about it, would you be carelessly willing to sign a legal document, selling your soul to anyone?

I wouldn’t.

 

We are walking a very thin line here between reality, dream and (borrowing from Alejandro Jodorowsky) “Psycho-magical” activities.

Of course most metaphysical performances can be- if that is our intention- deconstructed and reduced to mere theatrical acts. The reasons that prevent us to do so could be our social/religious respectfulness, our fear of the unknown, a “last resort” kind of need to believe (for example after trying all known medical healing procedures to no avail), or, simply, an unequivocal belief in the “Misterio”.

The full acceptance of a spiritual possession as a genuine manifestation basically means acknowledging our metaphysical ignorance and accepting some kind of deliverance from the unknown without the need for further explanation.

Are miracles real? There is indeed an enormous “archive” of miracles that supposedly have happened and that have been “proven” as genuine, over the centuries all over the world and in every religion.

The Catholic Church is constantly investigating, assessing “miraculous happenings” around the world and then decide to give them or not the official seal of veridicality.

We must also note here that the role the Lwa (possessing Spirit) plays in Dominican society is multifaceted. The Lwa is the doctor, the magician, the ancestor, the psychologist, the matrimonial counselor and much more, in a society that is still vastly underdeveloped.

Everybody looks for answers to their daily problems, pains and doubts.

They all look for answers, but not necessarily explanations.

A “miraculous” healing or solutions to one’s problems is usually good enough, even if it cannot be rationally explained.

The answers you receive from the Lwa are strictly dependent on your faith and belief that they will work for you. They are axioms of trust and fulfill a need for deliverance.

The empowerment is given to you with two conditions: to believe and to follow the Lwa’s instructions to the letter.

Sometimes I wondered if the Lwa’s solution, even with its lack of logical explanations, ends up being a more direct and focused type of empowerment than just being given a prescription drug in a clinic and sent home. After all the “cure” is prescribed in a trance and might work only if, before all things, you believe it will work and you exactly execute what the Lwa prescribes.

Modern psychiatry is starting to evaluate and even use similar paradigms, where the relationship between doctor and patient, between the cure and the healing process is based on the willingness and acceptance of the sick person to “do the work” for him/her self, alongside their doctor, in order to heal.

So, I am often tempted to say that, after all, it is fairly irrelevant to ascertain the veridicality of a possession. It would be perhaps like demanding to investigate the habits, the social life, and the most intimate beliefs of your allopathic doctor before you trust him to write you a prescription. Once you decide (or feel) that you believe, then, you let the Lwa (or your family doctor) work for you and let him teach you how to help yourself.

Finally, there are good and bad people in all walks of life.

The same applies to “brujos” and the to world of supernatural.

 

Some people ask me:” how come that it if a person is a medium, embodying a supernatural force through possession, that he or she does not /cannot use such powers to better their own social position/health/finances?” Based on my decade of research in these matters, he best answer that I can give to what sounds a petty and materialistic (albeit very common) question, is that the possessed Medium is just a different kind of “curandero”, someone with healing powers, but only while possessed, and these powers cannot and shouldn’t be used but in a generous, noble way, to give, to help fellows human beings.

 

 

Of course the exceptions always confirms the rule.

 

In the many years I have spent in the field researching Dominican popular religion I have met “Brujos” who not only built a very profitable business out of their activities, but who were also very able and willing, for the right price, to evoke negative, subterranean forces to try and do evil in the name of the petitioner.

What happens here? These Mediums are of a different category, they are willingly linked to the negative forces of the universe and they will eventually pay the price of their wrongdoing.

They all seem to be aware of this “pending destiny” and accept the consequences, in exchange for a wealthier lifestyle.

 

However, I was told many times that the clients, the petitioners themselves, who seek a solution to their problem through invoking evil forces instead of celestial ones, will end up paying a much higher price than the “Brujo” himself. This is because they initiated the request for negative forces to be invoked and eventually, usually after a speedy accomplishment of their petition - and their payment to the intermediary- (the Brujo), they’ll find there is an even higher price to be paid.

 

This is part of of the laws of nature and the supernatural. This is a given- and whoever wants to dabble in this “dark” side of things must be advised (and immancably is advised) to expect some karmic punishment to fall back on them.

 

In a future essay I’ll be describing in details the evil, negative, albeit fast-accomplishing esoteric work I was able to research in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. I will be trying to describe the legend and reality surrounding the phenomenon of the “BAKA”, the mythological beast that can fulfill all of his owner’s desires of wealth and success, but feeds itself with sacrificial blood from the very owner’s family members.   

 

Here you can find my Documentary on Haitian-Dominican popular religion MISTERIOS 

 

Music: "Hebe Bop" by Hasidic New Wave -Album Psycho Semitic

 

What do I know about Hasidic Jews? Not much.

 

I mostly buy my photographic goods from them!

I do that at Adorama and B&H, the two stores run by orthodox Jews, with the best assortment and the best prices in New York City.

 

What do I have in common with Hasidic Jews?

Not much.

Well…I have a fairly unkempt beard and long, curly hair but I was unmistakably born and raised Catholic in my native Italy.

 

There is, perhaps, a faint mnemonic oral history connection in my childhood with Jews, if we really want to dig deep.

 

My grandfather, during World War Two, was imprisoned by the Nazi and sent to a labor camp, where he befriended several Jews and nearly died with them, until my grandmother, a very strong willed woman, together with the wives of other prisoners, was able to organize an escape for their men, just a couple of nights before their husbands were to be shipped to Germany.

 

So, as a child, I did hear stories about those Jewish friends from my grandfather.

 

Nevertheless, my education and life are certainly a world apart from the Hasidic community, but for some reason, over the years, I have always had a fascination, not to mention a strong visual attraction for their very private, ancient looking society. Plus, I have a very keen culinary interest for certain kosher recipes, first amongst them: matzah ball soup.

 

Trying to make the best of a bitterly cold winter in New York City, last week I started taking photograph in a Hasidic neighborhood. With utmost respect for their right to privacy, I walked around one of their Brooklyn enclaves just a few hours before the start of Sabbath.

 

 

Everybody was extremely busy, rushing to finish all business before sundown. Entire families were often running down the streets, buying flowers, doing the last shopping, trying to find a parking spot, making the last calls on their cell phones.

 

You could feel this preparation as a powerful energy in the air. It made me think of the rest of the city, so far away, on that Friday afternoon, as if it was a different planet altogether.

 

Black clad men, boys and children started playing strange optical games in my lens, as if they were multiple reflections and projections of the same subject. I was rapidly loosing the notion of time, place and history, surrounded as I was by a perfect replica, or rather a vivid, realistic extension of a distant culture still being lived and written with strength and determination, black on white, just like those black coats on the snow covered sidewalks.

 

I soon realized that my bewilderment was not due to one of my usual psychosomatic reactions. Today it was more of a Psycho-Semitic one…

 

At sundown, a deafening siren blasted in the air, unequivocally announcing the beginning of the Sabbath and almost acoustically wiping off the working week to prepare bodies and souls for the next twenty-four hours of prayer, rest and reflection.

 

 

I took a few more frames in front of a Temple, while the last men and children were rushing to enter, quite oblivious to me and to my photography. Then I got on the subway and went back to the 21^st century.

 

My experience, for peripheral and marginal it may appear, triggered and augmented both my respect and my interest for this community.

 

I admit that, as an American in a brutally divided and divisive America, the close-knit social tissue of the Hasidic fascinates me.

 

Obviously a lot of my fascination also has to do with the visuals of it.

I admire the tenacity and the political statement of dressing today, even here in New York City, in exactly the same way they dressed centuries ago in the remotest regions of Eastern Europe.

 

 

And I guess I admire their tenacity in being able to “resist” the world at large, a world luring the majority of us towards an apparently inevitable consumerism and relativism, in all aspects of who we are, how we look and how we behave with each other, a world pasteurizing our individuality and our many ancestral cultural identities into a monochromatic mush. 

 

I know too little about the Hasidic community, the strongpoint of their belief, their history and their customs to have a realistic opinion about their lifestyle but I can certainly make some initial comparisons based on previous research I have conducted in different fields of oral tradition.

 

For example, I cannot but immediately notice that every single manifestation of oral tradition I have investigated in the past twenty years is by now either extinct or has gone through major changes due to the influences of modern society.

 

I could perhaps find a small number of exceptions to this rule, mostly in the oral tradition of Haiti, which in my personal experience is particularly resilient and difficult to erode.

 

Everything else, no matter how geographically remote or how strongly preserved in the name of faith, magic, healing or cultural identity, is inexorably mutating at a fast pace, succumbing to modernization.

 

In a world where corporations have more power and leverage than governments, in a world where socializing is less and less practiced and promoted, where family and society rules are bent, voided or ignored to accommodate financial interest and greed on all continents, the Hasidic tenacity certainly is, to say the least, appealing to someone like me who for all his life has tried to research and preserve the oral tradition of our ancestors.

 

 

Without doubt I am interested to hear from someone who considers television, computers and the technological orgy of our times as a negative presence in their children lives and want to avoid it, replacing it with more organic ways of learning such as books, music, socializing. Someone who has the determination to refrain, at least a day of the week, from switching on or off anything at all !

 

Of course, I can immediately see controversial issues and oxymoron too, as they are an inescapable fact of every society.

 

Some critics of these ultra-orthodox Jews, after hearing about my interest and fascination for the Hasidic community have hurriedly warned me about several things (and here I merely quote their words, refraining from a personal opinion, which my ignorance is still not allowing me to express).

 

They told me about the abusive treatment towards Hasidic women, segregated from the society of men as mere child bearers, who cannot even show their hair in public nor look at a man in the face, they told me about the double standards, apparently part of some Hasidic men sexual life, about the brutal and blindfolded activism of certain ultra-orthodox groups, especially in Israel.

 

 

Well, I definitely need to know more.

 

And, mind you, I don’t really care to reach any personal decision about what is right or wrong. When you investigate a phenomenon from a cultural and a visual angle, the “rights and wrongs” are just numbers in an equation. My short field trip to Brooklyn, the other day, rapidly convinced me that for a researcher and visual explorer of oral traditions like myself, something like the Hasidic community would be a greatly interesting topic to look into.

 

 

It is my hope, with utter unobtrusiveness, respect and determination, to establish some contacts within the New York Hasidic community. I would like to photograph a series of portraits of community elders as well as slices of everyday life, commerce, prayer and celebrations.

 

Considering I don’t know anybody in that community yet, I’ll need to do a lot research and brainstorming alone, at first, to envisage a viable field strategy for my new project.

 

I’ll probably do that after enjoying a matzah ball soup.