RED by Marcelo Isarrualde, BCN 09

Autorretrato/ Self Portrait, BCN 09

A view from Montjuïc, BCN 09

I lost part of my soul

It has to be said that it was a classic situation in which on does things without having taken necessary precautions to avoid any errors. Perhaps it was just destiny now that I have decided to move onto digital. But the mater of fact its that I have lost several collections of RAW files which as any image are irreplacable more so if we take into account that these were the images I took in the chinese cities of Harbin, the Forbidden City and old town Beijing. If that was not enough I have also lost the RAW files that I took in Uyuni, Lake Titicaca and La Paz.
I must say that I am heart broken. There are no other words to put this in a better way. It was the first time that I decided to take on a trip just my G9 as the only camera and that was also a big mistake.
China was a very odd journey in which in just a week I flew over to Finland, then Beijing and onto Harbin and back and where I thought I was not going to have much time to do any work, So I took just my G9 and no other film cameras. How mistaken I was. Harbin where I could have spent weeks photographing everything and everyone, was a fascinating place which I ought to visit again, sometime hopefully.
But as I have just discovered, all the images of "the swimmners" , the urban ladscapes of Harbin as well as all the photographs of the Forbidden City and Tiannanmen are now gone.
I can´t seem to find them in any of my hard drives where I do all the back up. Its a very strange situation as everything else that was saved right after and before hand remains intact.
I am now coming to terms with it.
Similarly, that happened as well with the Bolivian files. Fortunately I went to Bolivia with my Rolleiflex and my FM2 as well as the digital Canon G9 so the tragedy is a lesser one i guess. Having said that, all the images of lake Titicaca and salar de Uyuní were taken with the G9 and are now gone. But for my own consolation I do have intact all the color negatives that I took of El Alto and La Paz, both in black and white and color.
It has to be said that it has happened in the past that I have taken images that did not come out right or were ruined by the film process and even affected by the x ray atthe airport security control area.
I remember once when I went to cover an event for a news paper and after shooting 36 images I realized that my camera kept of producing new photos out of a 36 frame film. 37, 38, 39,.....It was obvious then that the film was not loaded properly and therefore I had no images at all. But never I think, I had lost a negative or raw material of images that I regarded as very important ones. Photographs that I had seen and processed, edited and counted on them as relevant to my portfolio or particular project I was working on.
I am to blame for it as it is obvious that deleting them without having made sure that they were backed up was indeed, very clumsy. It appears by conversations with colleagues that this is a classic mistake that we all photographers have to make at least once.

Its a learning process . With digital technology, the production of images is far bigger and almost every time you go out to shoot something you end up with several GB of images that need to be securely copied, edited, and backed up.
The work time required for that is enormous and It is quite obvious that the method of working and the handling of work flow in digital requires a much more methodic way of working to make sure that once you decide to delete a folder, everything has been backed up at least three times.
What I have left are some low res jpegs that I uploaded onto Facebook and that I will be getting them back just to show them here. Images that I will never be able to print or use out of the web. Sad but very true.
I am heart broken.

Pro-Imaging

http://www.pro-imaging.org/

When night falls. BCN 09

Visapourlimage´09

http://www.visapourlimage.com/index.do

The Camberwell Beauty, London 1997

Nymphalis antiopa: Known as the Mourning Cloak in North America and the Camberwell Beauty in the British Isles, is a large butterfly native to Eurasia and North America. The name originated from the discovery of two individuals at Coldharbour Lane in Camberwell in 1748. Camberwell is at the heart of the old London dockland, and the pair had almost certainly been stowaways on ships bringing timber from Scandinavia. The immature form of this species is sometimes known as the spiny elm caterpillar. Other older names for this species include Grand Surprise and White Petticoat. A powerful flier, this species is sometimes found in areas far from its usual range during migration. This species is generally considered a butterfly of woodlands, though it may be occasionally be found in drier areas such as the deserts. During migration, they may be found in almost any habitat.

I spent 7 years living in Camberwell. 10 Brunswick Vilas was the address and many people thought it was some fine location and very up market but it was in Camberwell. Certainly the house had some grandeur as it was a four storey victorian terrace house with a lovely garden. But Camberwell is in South London in the borough of Southwark, off the Walworth Road where some of the action

in Dicken´s Great Expectations takes place.

It was then and there, in 1996 and just after I had finished my year at Goldsmith when I was wondering the streets looking for a subject, a theme for a new project to work on. I thought of doing something on the diversity and multicultural live the presided over the area. The mix variety of different communities that had landed in this part of the world and to which I then belonged. Black Caribeans, Nigerians, Ghanans, Indians and Pakistani, Chipriots and Turkish, Greeks and Italians, Spanish, and of course English from all paths of life. The upper middle classes that lived up in The Grove and towards Dulwich Park, people like myself that occupied the terrace houses or those that inhabited the numerous council flats that dotted the whole area.

Camberwell was a rare mix of many things and a complete different scenario depending on the time of the day. Mornings were always somewhat dense and heavy as many on the out patients from the famous phyciatrist hospital Moseley were let out wondering the streets. On rainy days the whole place was a grim and depressing landscape, a perfect Dickensian background for many things to happen. Sunny summer days were vibrant and colorful, almost mediterranean.

One day I was on my way to Burgess Park and I found a old victorian building, a home to a boxing club which surprisingly had on one of its wall and engraved rather large image of a butterfly.

The tile work read " The Camberwell Beauty". It got my attention and arose my curiosity to find out what that was doing there and where did it come from.

It turned out that this was a common name within the local popular culture. A very well known butterfly that was found for the first time in the area as It came from abroad. I just love the idea of a butterfly that immigrated to England most probably on a boat that carried goods and people that later settled in the Islands.

It was a perfect allegory for what I was working on and was trying to do.

The resulting project is a body of work in which I began to explore a visual language that would somehow define my next documentary works. Often armed with a Hasselblad but most of the time with my Rolleiflex. I set out to photograph the neighborhood and its people with the intention to depict the simple ordinariness of their everyday life with particular attention on how one as a immigrant, tend to reproduce habits from one´s own culture in an attempt not to forget the place where we all came from.

This photograph of the two men was one of the first I took of the series.

Both cypriot as well as friends were one a turkish cypriot and a greek cypriot the other. Both were exiled by the war between their communities and they had meet in London were they became very close friends. On summer days the would seat on the pavement, facing the olive and feta cheese shop that Soteris, a toothless cross eyed dusty looking greek cypriot and his charming hugely overweight much younger wife, owned and run together.

Every afternoon they would come to the shop to meet for a chat, they would take the chairs out and as if they were in Larnaka, Nicosia or Limasol, and they would sip turkish coffee while chatting with other members of their exiled community that came to the gathering. One could not resist imagining that behind them was the Mediterranean sea when if fact was the A2, the Camberwell Church Street what run behind their backs .

It didn´t matter. It was summer, it was sunny and that little strip of pavement in Camberwell was where they would feel more at home.

They are now both dead, but the shop remains there.

Last time I was in England I went back to Camberwell to see my old friend James who lives there with Charlotte and their son Rubin. On my way to see the Waddell´s I visited the shop as it has become a kind of right of passage for me. Of course the lady owner as she saw me came out from behind the counter to salute and hug me and without hesitation, put together a little bag with assorted olives, sesame bread, taramosalata dip and a chunk of feta cheese for my breakfast. Needless to say that she looked offended when I tried to pay.

We had a little chat and I asked her about the two men when she confirmed that they had both passed away. As I remembered that I had given her a small hand made and signed print of the photograph, I asked her if she still had it.

She proudly smiled and said "of course", pointing towards the doorway. There it was the print.

Dusty, stained, wrinkled and frameless, pinned like a trophy to the upper corner of the door.

Rambla del Raval, Barcelona 2002

http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2006/01/barcelona_fotog.html

Mi Linhof Technikardan



Después de darle muchas vueltas he empezado a trabajar en digital y aunque conservo casi todas mis cámaras analógicas, he decidido vender una de las tres Linhof que tengo en mi haber. Esta es una joya que solo vendo porque tengo otra indéntica.

Hubo un tiempo en que pensaba que necesitaba tener dos en caso de que mi cámara de placas fallara y me saliera un trabajo mientras estaba en el taller. Total que un día me compré esta cámara en Ebay. Pero resultó que al final en Barcelona hay un servicio técnico de Linhof y rara es la vez que una Linhof se estropea y pocas las ocasiones en que tardan más de dos días en repararme la cámara.

Dice Marcelo Isarrualde que yo soy como un taxista que conduce un Mercedes.

Sea como fuere la cosa es que de pronto me he visto con los dos Mercedes aparcados y he decidido vender uno de ellos.

Esta cámara como digo, la compré en Ebay a un tal Wayne Bartz, fotógrafo de arquitectura estadounidense que a sus 82 años había decidido vender todo su equipo y se había comprado una digital de bolsillo para hacer fotos a sus nietos. Como es natural, cuando se enteró de que yo tambien me dedicaba a fotografiar arquitectura se emocionó y me escribió un mail muy simpático explicándome lo contento que estaba que su "Mercedes" fuera a parar a manos de alguien que lo cuidaría y lo mimaría.

Por cierto las Linhof, la mía y la de Marcelo, son las culpables de nuestra amistad, pero esa es otra historia.

"Southwark Views", London 2001