Mezcal
Oaxaca, Mexico 2010
Oaxaca is waiting for me once more with its strong, pungent flowers’ scent, with the smell of mezcal and mole inundating my nostrils and that almost stun you. We take pictures of comparsas, we go along with them to cemeteries, on the street while they are singing songs, while they are dancing and crying before their dead ones. The night in Atzompa always bestow upon us moments of pure magic. We see the light of dawn sweetly blending for a few istants with the glean of thousand of lit candles. Then the day comes over and all the people start filing out of the cemetery. Only a few drunkards and some lonely dogs still wander around the tombs. Along with my students we try to capture the significant moments of these celebrations so strongly felt by the local population willing to give up everything else to make sure the be with their dear ones to remember them, to pay tribute, feed them, give them their favorite drinks with love and devotion. Mezcal, as all the years, help us eliminating our fears, our paranoia; it makes us get closer to the people. We drink it, we share it, we are being offered some. We forget our fears and take pictures of these celebrations trying to capture the intimate essence. We go through intense editing sessions. We alternate digital and analogical. I try to make my students understand the immense gap between the few images that do tell the essential qualities of a moment and the vast majority of pictures that didn’t make it and got anchored to the the sad descriptivety of the quotidian. We continue with the editing of Al Campo. Some good suggestions and advise come up. We continue to distill their images. Some of them begin to tell the soul of those fleeting moments that the camera has swollen like a voracious monster indiscriminately. Only the photographer’s eye manages, sometimes, to separate and transcend them.
EB
