Gone City

Zaculeu, Huehuetenango, Guatemala

2012-02-12T09:28:00.000-05:00

Huehuetenango, Guatemala

2012-02-11T10:39:00.000-05:00

Talleres - Workshops in Guatemala

2012-02-09T20:22:00.001-05:00

Starting tomorrow, I'll be giving a two-day workshop on photographic composition in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. If you need further information, get in touch at jmmsevigny@gmail.com.

Due to the kind of unforeseen and unavoidable scheduling craziness that has traditionally marked my Central American photographic adventures, the date for the Guatemala City workshop has been changed. The flyer below reflects the final and correct information.

Space for both workshops is limited so if you haven't registered already, I advise doing so as soon as possible.

In the meantime, there is also this event scheduled for DAC in Guatemala City, along with another one-day workshop set for Antigua. By the time I am finished I expect to have met every single person in Guatemala. More information to come.

Guatemala, Jazz City

2012-02-09T17:34:00.000-05:00

I hope nobody will think that because I've posted so few pictures recently, that I'm not working. To the contrary, I'm doing more photography than at probably any other point in my life, but I'm selfish and secretive and am keeping the new work to myself until that great day comes when whatever happens happens and the pictures get seen. But because it's been so long since I posted anything new, here's a picture of a street musician in Guatemala City. Juan Coltren?

A number of small things that are important to me

2012-02-06T11:18:00.000-05:00

1) Ladies' Bar is no longer up at socialdocumentary.net, which is fine. I've gotten tired of talking about that 2007 project, haven't exhibited it in years, and have no plans to do so. If you want to see it, it's here at Luminous Lint.

2) Teresa Parker, printmaker, curator, and friend, reminds me that one of the advantages of being an artist is that you can choose how much public exposure you want to allow of yourself as a person. Recently, and for reasons that I can't quite put a finger on, I've become annoyed with doing interviews. Given that I'm now working on a completely new project and not exhibiting as often as I have before, I'm looking forward to doing fewer interviews as well. Yes, I've already agreed to do a few here in Central America and I have to honor my commitments. But in truth, I would far rather speak to any non-journalist, even for grassroots style video, audio or print, than to unimaginative reporters, who generally ask me the same five questions. I have never created work to attract media attention, but rather to please myself and share my photographs with others. The media allows me to do that, but only according to their terms.

3) The last ever exhibition of Nomads will take place in 2013 in San Salvador at a very special venue. Final details are still being worked out, but it's going to happen, and then those photographs, like the ones from Ladies' Bar, will be shelved for a very, very long time.

From the road. Respect.

JS

Mythmakers al Mestizo

2012-01-31T13:44:00.001-05:00

Mythmakers al Mestizo is a Chicago group show in which I'm blessed to have my work appear with that of some of my favorite artists, who happen to be best friends: Susana Veloz, Saltillo, Mexico; Beatrice K. Turner, Chicago; Guillermo Medina, Cordoba, Mexico; Teresa J. Parker, Chicago; and Eulalio Fabie de Silva, Chicago. Stop by and check it out. It's in the Pilsen neighborhood, one of my favorite places.

Death don't have no mercy

2012-01-31T09:12:00.003-05:00

On a bus somewhere between San Salvador and Guatemala City, a shadow of sadness falls across my heart. It's dusk and the sun has stretched out across the jagged mountains forming a single, horizontal streak of rose-colored-orange illuminating a landscape crying out in silent pain.

Genocide erased by growth of vegetation and the taming of wild plains into tillable farmland. Unimaginable cruelties buried not under soil, but intangible layers of time. Blood, long dried, turned into an unlikely fertilizer. And small bones, broken, white and meatless, so numerous they could fill tractor-trailers.

Of course, there is more to Central America than genocide. Somewhere, beyond the smoking bonfires in the villages, someone gets married; someone kneels to pray; and a couple makes love in a small, sweaty shack -- a release from toils of agricultural labor and a true expression of solidarity (by which I do not mean to employ that word so abused by the Marxist left). But because I'm as brainwashed by history books and newspapers as others are by the television, I see what I have taught myself to see, what I have chosen to see, what I must see.

If only I had grown up in a suburb outside, say, Washington DC, in Virginia or Maryland, in one of those families invited to attend the Clinton Inaugural Ball. If only I'd gotten a baseball glove for Christmas instead of cameras, books and music. If only I had studied something sensible. If my father had not been a Republican Anarchist (to use a phrase of His invention) and if my mother had not been the most apolitical of Communists I might cross this region by bus, like all the others, eyes closed; headphones on; thinking only of friends and family waiting to receive me at the station.

But it is unfair to single those things out. This has nothing to do with my family or education. I have worked in newspapers, a singularly middle-class life, with a townhouse on a lake and rent that was not difficult to pay (I even had a television, which I don't think I ever turned on). I've cut stained glass, painted hotel rooms, built pagodas outside homes in Florida, worked at Minnesota factories, and answered phones at New York call centers. This other path, leading from Miami to Central America (clearly an abbreviated description) is one I chose.

In the meantime, they are rebuilding the plaza in San Salvador where, during Monsignor Oscar Romero's funeral, government troops opened fire on mourners who wanted to get inside to say good-bye. What hurts most is that the construction crews have erected temporary walls of corrugated aluminum so that it is nearly impossible to see that they are in effect bulldozing Auschwitz, Dresden or the Krome Avenue Immigrant Prison, and with it, part of our collective history, part of my own psychic past. These flimsy walls are put up around the construction-destruction site out of guilt. The workers know what they do is wrong so they do it behind theater curtains. And one day there will be a great ribbon-cutting at the new plaza, perhaps attended by President Funes himself, and there will be the announcement, or at least the implication, that San Salvador is now a first world country, right up there with Switzerland.

But the lie will not last. Drunks will piss in the plaza and pick-pockets will conspire behind patriotic monuments to heroes who mean nothing to the shoe-shiners across the street. Prostitutes will sell themselves to tourists on their way to Costa Rica. Old men will gather there waiting to die alongside women struggling to sell 12 plantains for a dollar.

The sun sets over the mountains, the bus crawls along a highway never built for buses, and it gets dark quickly. I put on my headphones and try to channel the middle-class, Democratic, slightly-left-of-center idealistic voter within. But Rev. Gary Davis only wants to pick at the saddest of all guitars and sing:

Death don't have no mercy in this land.
Death don't have no mercy in this land.
He'll come to your house and he won't stay long.
You'll look in your bed and somebody be gone.
Death don't have no mercy in this land.

Central America to Rome and Back Again

2012-01-28T12:36:00.003-05:00

I stalk insanity through brothels and barrooms, along backstreets and waterfronts, and at the end of the day, I come home with pictures that show what's real. Or not. I fancy myself some kind of Carl Denham without the ship or the cage, but that's not true either. Really, I wander around talking to people, people who forever reason, I have come to understand. Sometimes I take pictures of them. Sometimes I don't. The rest -- all the chest-pounding and posturing -- is bullshit. There is nothing less romantic than the work I do. But it is real and I sleep well at night knowing that the drooling pimps who own the machinery and make sure the knives stay sharpened have failed to trap me, at least for one more day. I worry more about being trapped by the thugs I meet, in those alleys and bars. But frankly, I don't worry much. I can take care of myself. And any allegations that I can't have yet to be proven. Fuck the police. And the thieves, too.

This is not going to be a limerick.

There once was a young man from San Salvador, who pursued relentlessly by US-backed government forces, was finally granted exile in Rome. Shortly after he left this country, his long-time girlfriend discovered she was pregnant. It was too late. An ocean and a civil war had broken up what would have been a family. There would be no reunion. Not soon, anyway.

The young man had once fought, head full of revolutionary ideals, in the cities, suburbs and semi-jungles of Central America, dreaming of a better world for his children. Children. That was an abstract idea when he'd carried a carbine. And now, in the civilized world of New Rome, where he'd been given an apartment and a job as a government clerk, he learned he'd left one behind. He could barely remember the seige at San Salvador when they'd taken the capital block by bloody block. All he could remember was Che Guevara, flags of Lenin, and fuck the Yanqui and hasta la victoria siempre. And though he'd never seen his daughter, somehow, against all logic, he could remember her.

More than a decade later, they met, but not in person. They met by telephone. The calls were short at first but grew longer. She phoned him from the brothel where she worked downtown. He started sending money. But it wasn't enough. The calls continued to come. From the brothel.

And so he learned that in an El Salvador now controlled by men who had once worn guerilla fatigues but now wore suits and ties, his daughter was working as a whore. This is not the insanity I look for when I walk around, with the mission statement, stolen from a long-gone Coney Island attraction, to "shoot the freak," and as my brother adds, "before the freak shoots you." Which more or less describes what I do. Get in. Get out. Keep your head attached to your body. Because the freak, no matter what you might think, has a gun and knows how to use it.

No. This is the stuff of nightmares. This is the price of something called victory, which charges the same steep wages as defeat and breaks the backs of those who wear the medal. It is a story about putting your very body into the pathways of bullets, learning that you have no choice but to flee, and then watching a body made from your body, skeleton, breasts and all, sell itself to the drunks, addicts and gangsters along the avenue.

I did not take any photographs of her when I met her last week. It was too sane, too commonplace in this world divided by stupid ideologies and majestic oceans. There is nothing novel about tragedy. Not in the era of Civilization and "complete cosmetic control."

She said they are working through the Italian embassy to allow her passage to Europe -- along with the once-young-man's two grandchildren (whom he has never met). They say that because he works for the government, it will be easier. She could be in Europe within six months. That's the human dream. America. Europe. Freedom. Liberation. From Laredo, Mexico to the streets of San Salvador, it makes mouths water. But it comes only after the shooting has stopped, and even then, the pain lingers. And 20 years after the government signed peace accords here, nobody takes much comfort in the silence, which is broken by gangland gunfire and bad, shellshock dreams.

Glass

2012-01-28T12:10:00.003-05:00

Downtown

2012-01-28T09:02:00.000-05:00

Post #999: accepting violence

2012-01-26T09:51:00.002-05:00

What differentiates El Salvador from Mexico is a collective will for social order, seldom obtained but sought with near unanimity. If nothing else, these people know what war is all about and few people kid themselves with the idea that some "crackdown" by the police, the army, or any other branch of the government can do anything about skyrocketing homicide rates. Hell, 20 years after the peace accords were signed between the FMLN and the government, there's been little change in the landscape, many here say. But the desire for a kind of order based on atheistic, natural law, ala, Emma Goldman, survives.

Fortunately, I have not met any delusional, Javier Sicilia-style peacenicks spreading the old lie that peace comes from old Biblical ideas like loving your neighbor. Take-it-in-the-ass, barrio punks with too much testosterone and too many guns care fuck all about social order or good will. Getting to heaven via the cross is not on their list of priorities. What has worked, historically, is to put people in prison, preferably, for life.

I guess Sicilia feels pretty god-damned good about himself. Having lost a son to Mexico's violence, he is almost, but not quite, a martyr. If the movement he leads with such egotistical zeal were of any consequence, he would have been dead by now, kidnapped, decapitated and hung from a bridge by the very people he hopes to convince that the road to the future is paved with smooth stones of pacifism. The lesson of Christianity, a dear friend once told me, is that if you act like Christ, you get crucified. The only way to deal with criminals -- whether they wear masks, white collars, or badges -- is to take away their power. Praying for them doesn't do a god damned bit of good. Nor do they deserve our prayers.

The Zona Roja in San Salvador, meanwhile, is a Caravaggio painting in garish, overblown colors. There's a kind of anarchism at play. Thieves and killers wander the narrow, smog-contaminated streets. Men too drunk to stay awake collapse at mid-day on the sidewalks, but whores and their clients protect one another.

Someone warns me to keep my camera hidden so as not to tempt thieves. Someone else tells me not to walk beyond the next corner, lest I find myself in "mara territory." Soldiers in uniform are not welcome. Anywhere. Across the street from one whorehouse, in an unpaved parking lot, Evangelical Christians with wild faith in their eyes dance and pray under an enormous cardboard billboard showing the Temple at Jerusalem. The soul of this country has been so successfully monopolized by double-dip Christians that many people don't know which of the building downtown is the Cathedral -- that historic place where Monsignor Oscar Romero's body once lay, out of reach of his followers who tried to get inside to say good-bye to Central America's one, true Saint, but who were gunned down by the dozen in the attempt.

Romero, in fact, may be the figure who marks the difference between Mexico and El Salvador. Recalling a painting by Anselm Kiefer, the sad truth of the matter is that modern Mexico has never had a spiritual hero -- only politicians posing as messiahs. Witness Sicilia's dumb-headed protagonism, which has already resulted in the death of one of his sycophants who was foolish enough to try to "forge a truce" with a drug cartel; or the false prophecies of Mexican Presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador with his ridiculous proposal for a "Republic of Love," an idea that would make Jerry Brown laugh until he pissed his polyester pants.

Welcome to the Jungle, someone posted on Twitter when I announced my arrival in El Salvador. Violence is. Violence always will be. From the crucifixion of Christ to the bombing of Dresden and the rape of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo. It can be channeled into a kind of order but never, ever extinguished. The burning bush is not a message to Moses to lead his people out of bondage, but a symbol of the rage in the human soul, put there by cruel rulers and a system that forces us to bow down to invisible gods and unreachable corporate chair-persons who would very happily watch us starve to death so they can go on playing golf, or whatever it is that the very rich do with all the money they steal from us.

El Salvador is a violent country. But Salvadorans, unlike Mexicans, understand violence. Everything from the 1932 peasant massacre to the twelve-year civil war here has taught them that violence is a part of life. There is so much yin and so much yang and pretending that the streets glow with the white light of saviors won't do much to stop the shitstorm. At the same time, they live with the dream that the land, as TS Eliot might have said, can one day be put in order. But pacifists are few and far between, which is an idea that gives me faith that El Salvador will overcome. Through action, not pretty words.

Big Fish

2012-01-24T08:09:00.000-05:00

Puerto de la Libertad, El Salvador

2012-01-19T10:27:00.002-05:00

Guatemala City

2012-01-16T08:27:00.000-05:00

Shoe shiners, Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico

2012-01-16T08:24:00.000-05:00

San Salvador at last

2012-01-15T09:20:00.000-05:00

After almost a year of delays, I´m finally in San Salvador, giving a workshop on composition for photographers at the Universidad Centroamericana. Thanks to Claudia Torres for making it happen.

Yesterday was the first of four, four hour sessions and we had a great time talking about Henri Cartier Bresson, Bruce Davidson, and even Miguelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio and Diego Velazquez.

This is a wonderful, chaotic, fascinating city where I am fortunate to have a good number of friends. Pictures will be coming but after a four day bus ride from Chicago to get here, I need to get my head together before I can really concentrate.

Apologies to everyone I didn´t or couldn´t visit while crossing Mexico. There was no time to stop, and to be perfectly honest, I love your country but it scares the shit out of me. Can you folks get rid of Calderon already, put the criminals in jail forever, and get the army off the street? Millions of people would be better off for it.

Love!

Woman in purple, NY

2012-01-10T09:43:00.001-05:00

Times Square, Manhattan, NY

2012-01-08T09:25:00.000-05:00

Two Manhattan men

2012-01-08T08:36:00.002-05:00

For everyone else waiting for the end of winter

2012-01-03T14:49:00.002-05:00

Trajectory >

2012-01-02T11:25:00.005-05:00

Something we talk about in photography composition classes is the direction in which a photograph "moves," or trajectory. Here are three photographs that "go" from right to left. This picture and the two below all direct the eye from one side of the picture frame to the other. The "tool" used to do this, in all three cases, is the direction the subject is facing.

Untitled Coney Island Beach

2012-01-02T11:22:00.002-05:00

Walking New York

2012-01-02T11:20:00.002-05:00

Sony NEX with 1960s Nikkor lens

2011-12-30T23:03:00.001-05:00

I took this picture with the lens reviewed here, connected to a Sony NEX-5 with a Chinese adapter. Works great! I've found that the Nikon lens is actually warmer and has less of a magenta cast than the Sony lenses. Not better. Just different.

Quick review: Nikkor lens adapter for Sony NEX cameras

2011-12-29T15:11:00.001-05:00

The mailman just delivered mine after I shelled out a whopping 20 bucks. This little thing looks like any other lens adapter from the old days but lets me use thousands of recent and ancient Nikkor lenses on my NEX-5. Yay! I've got no problem with Sony lenses. The 16mm is underrated and the 18-55mm kit zoom is good enough for most people, too. But I've already got tons of money invested in Nikon glass, so spending a little change to be able to keep using my old lenses, like the 17-35mm 2.8, which cost me an arm and a leg, is a no brainer.

I shot the picture above with the worst lens I own, a beaten up, Tokina 28-70mm that never really focuses dead on because it's so old and knackered. People bitch that they can't get autofocus with this kind of set up but who cares? If you grew up shooting all-manual Nikon and Pentax cameras, this is easy to focus, primarily because of Sony's "peaking" system, which you have to try out for yourself to understand. As for exposure, set it on aperture priority and the camera picks out a shutter speed by itself. Viva viva!

This is just a test shot, taken at 2.8 aperture and 70mm, or about 105mm when you factor in the cropped sensor. I'll post more after I try out some other lenses. For now, I'm extremely pleased.

Adorama and B&H sell a version of this adapter for almost 300 bucks. This one, by a company called Cowboy Studios, seems sturdy enough for me, and the premium priced version won't actually do anything better or different.

It's worth mentioning that people like me who have been throwing money into gear for a while know that lenses are more important than bodies, particularly in the digital age. Camera bodies go out of date by the time you get them home. I've had this old Tokina zoom since 1999 and I still use it.

I took the picture below at f5.6 with the same crappy lens, this time set for infinity.