Two girls getting ready for school in Colonia Avicola, Juarez-2007
It’s the little moments that work for me.
It’s an exquisite privilege to disappear. It doesn’t always happen. It’s really great -for the photographer- when it does. Photography out in the open, in other people’s realities, nobody even noticing.
I guess that’s what a lot of my photography is all about.
I hear that realism in photography is dead. The idea is that every thing has been shot. We’ve seen it all.
It’s time to explore ourselves, see the world through inner truths (like I’m not spending a lifetime trying to figure out what that is…like we’re a quarter as interesting as what’s “out there.”).
I guess.
However, my “inner life,” is nowhere near interesting as is a little girl, protectively picking out a spec of cilantro, with a twig, from her sister’s teeth, as they get ready to go off to school.
In documentary work these little moments mean a lot. Everything, really.
The back story: I was with an Italian reporter ( for the newspaper Corriere della Sera) doing a story on the femecides of Juarez.
He was exploring the idea of women walking, alone, unprotected, as these two girls had to do, to get to a bus to go to school.
They would walk about a mile, hook up with their bus, and, often, in the winter, they’d come home in the dark, walking through a neighborhood where many women have disappeared. Deseparados.
Vulnerable. How’s that for “real.”
No inner life story at all.
Just what’s there.
I should express myself about this?
How else can you show what would be lost if either of these two were no more?
Old school photography.
I like it.
