A shroud of silence covers the pact of silence. The shroud is a wrapping. Rubbery, elastic, like the polyester film used to store food in the freezer. The pact is really made up of many pacts: married couples who live together, lovelessly; major or minor betrayals , frustrations, complicities. Like a molecular structure, the sum of the pacts is a network, a social group. The nation itself. The plastic envelopes them like sandwiches on white bread, and they end up all stuck together: the ham meshed with the bread and the cheese.
You negotiate. But fear and guilt grow. They show up in material form, in bodily sensations: an acid taste in your throat, like bile, that suddenly descends to and becomes heartburn. Then it rises up again and becomes a jabbing pain in your chest. Nightmares. Persecutions. You might not be sure who’s being betrayed, but you are always a traitor. I have never read it, but I think Crime and Punishment has something to do with this.
That’s the way it is with texts. The words may be sincere and sound nice, harmonious, musical, but they come and go. There is a margin of ambiguity. There are synonyms. If one word doesn’t work, you use another. With the image, it’s different. Especially with portraits. There is no room to mess around and you can’t use adjectives. The intensity of the look, the gesture, and the position of the hands. The secret is to be on the look out for an encounter.
At this point, I don't think that, in order to say what you want to say, there is any need to take two hundred photos of the American west, as Richard Avedon did. It’s enough to do a few good portraits that express two or three basic core sentiments.
On a formal level, objects help with the composition, but they also symbolize things. In the portrait of Rogerio, for example, the airplane is an airplane, but it’s also an offering, an object of desire and a missile. We already know what a yoke around the neck signifies. And as for color, the red in the background has the power of the classics. That red and the model’s skin build on each other’s power. A purplish black. Full lips color. A sweating Carioca. A deep Yoruba. An authentic Cuban. A dark green Haitian. Marimba. Katinga. Kilombo Camdomblé.
In essence, stagings—at least the ones I do—are nothing more than theatricalized portraits. The seven men who are play the doctors, nurses and forensic expert standing to the right of the autopsy photo face the camera with so much emotion, as if they were actually there, thirty centimeters away from a beautiful young woman, naked, made-up, mutilated, inaccessible. There is also the question of here and now, the photograph itself. Generating a climate to capture the emotion of that moment is one of the secrets to taking a good photo: all you need to do is tell the models not to do anything, not to act, not to breathe, to stand still. They are not actors. It’s certainly the first time in their lives they have found themselves in a situation like this. They accept the game and play their roles. The disguise (wardrobe) is a resource for drawing out the deepest sentiments. They are waiters in a bar, taxi drivers, plumbers, university professors, a couple of visual artists. It’s all the same. When they look at the camera, everything comes undone. The individual disintegrates and their eyes speak of the only thing it is possible to speak of in this passage through life. Nothing new. The same thing all the tangos say: the shame at having been and the pain of being no more.
The context is also important. The time and place where everything happens. Reality. The scene –the emotion that blossoms in the expressions and the gestures of the group in question– takes place in my studio on Finochietto Street, in the Barracas neighborhood of Buenos Aires. In the digital post-production, I can use (almost) the same technology that they use in the North. But outside my door there are skinny horses pulling carts carrying the bottles, scrap metal and cardboard collected by ragpickers. Just a ten-minute ride from the president’s office, the Casa Rosada, and just over ten blocks from the expensive Puerto Madero area, with its pretentious and unnecessarily aerodynamic Calatrava Bridge.
All in the name of culture and progress. The problem is that I have seen—with my own eyes and many time—entire families, with children, fighting over food in the garbage in front of rows of upscale restaurants. They hurry to get at the food before the garbage trucks come by and pick it up.
I get angry because I am convinced that this is not how it should be. If we don’t give some away, there’s no answer. I am always grateful when I stop at the traffic light on the Avenida 9 de Julio that the kids just beg for a coin in exchange for washing my windshield, instead of slashing my throat, eating my liver and driving off to the slums in my car with my wife inside as a prisoner. The other Buenos Aires. And on top of it, the kids say “Thanks and God bless”.
Deep down, then, “The Autopsy” is a document, regardless of how many adornments, changes, digital touchups, rehearsals, proofs, errors, references to Rembrandt, to the photo of Che dead in Bolivia there might be. “Death is a young nation,” Carlos Masoch, who plays the part of the doctor, told me when I showed him the finished photograph. The illusions of a country that could not be. A broken generation. Amputated. A poorly done autopsy on the body of a woman who died unnecessarily. A useless, phony, clandestine, perverse, heartless autopsy.
And the blood isn’t even blood. The blood is red ink. Makeup. A simulacrum. The staging of pain. A ceremony that lets me render the most intimate feeling material, image. Then, work, magic, faith, will, and alchemy conspire to make the red ink the blood of all bloods. The blood of the patient who heals the male nurse. The blood of Liliana Maresca. The blood of my brother, who didn’t survive, and of Violeta, who could not be born.
And also the blood spilled in the Gaza Strip that I once saw on the cover of the newspaper Clarín in a bar near my house. A technical error, the caption said. That easy. It’s written in the newspaper.
I look at the face, the expression of the father, holding up that baby wrapped in rags in the photo from Gaza. The screams frozen by the click of the camera. The feeling becomes unbearable. I order another Fernet Branca with soda water and ice, fully aware that I am doing it in order to escape, which is useless, which does me no good, but I order it anyway and I look outside. It’s raining, drizzling really. I am sitting at the table with the best view of Parque Lezama. I don’t care that they want to close the historic Bar Británico across the street. I’ve been coming to this bar, El Hipopótamo, for a long time. I feel a bit sad for Horacio González and Eduardo Grossman, who like El Británcio so much. But truth of the matter is it’s all the same to me. Besides, I like the diagonal view of the park better from here.
I look at the people. The tourists. The ragpickers. Calm and balanced, everything fits together. The problems of the world are faraway. I am already a bit pissed and images of pretty things come to me automatically. It’s late afternoon, almost night. I recall songs. The transvestites who come and go along the corner of Ipiranga and São João Avenue. I remember last year, Lena, the children and I went to Havana to visit my in-laws; they didn’t have room in the house to put us up, so we stayed in the Hotel Riviera, in a room way up high, with huge picture windows that faced the Malecón. I spent a long time one day watching a soundless narrative sequence; something marvelous that film can never ever capture, aspire to, imitate, or achieve. That deep emotion that is reality itself flowing in real time: the waves crashing on the sidewalk and the street, the sea, the horizon, the Lada cars coming and going at the same speed, some sidecar motorcycles, a young woman by herself, with long dark wavy hair blowing in the wind that looks wonderful from afar, looking toward the sea for an incredibly long time and a cluster of young tourists.
A bunch of idiots. As my friend Roberto Fernández says, “The king is wearing no clothes.” Everything is exposed and everything ends up being a pun. And as Vinicius de Moraes says, “Let’s get married, but afterwards comes the carnival”.
That’s why I like it here. Latin America. Buenos Aires. I like what I have at hand: my bars, my home, my neighborhood, and luckily I don’t have to speak English. And I do what I damn well please. I am rewriting the memoirs of underdevelopment. I claim as my own other people’s poetry. I can split in two: I’m the river, the raft, the waters of March. The character of Horacio Quiroga’s who died delirious on the bottom of the canoe that floated aimlessly along the Upper Paraná River. The man who pleaded that the river Manzanares let him through because his sick mother had called for him. Guillermo Cubillos in his pirogue, impassively defying the storm, and as he rowed into the night, drawing from the oars the melodic roar of a beautiful cumbia.
Marcos López