It’s been a great week — with my work with Human Rights Watch off the ground and getting some news images in print — and, on this Friday the 13th, I can’t help but think about good luck. I really do feel like good luck has come my way recently, and that my life and work are starting to blend in special, unexpected ways — ways that I have wanted, but ways that did not happen when I was more desperate, more anxious, trying harder to make something happen that I was not yet ready to handle.
What the heck am I talking about?
What I’m talking about is that when I moved to Argentina more than four years ago I had big dreams about learning Spanish and traveling all over South America and making great images and telling even greater stories. But that didn’t happen. For one thing, learning Spanish — I mean really learning to live with the stuff — has proved far more challenging (and rewarding) than I could have have ever imagined. For another thing, I got focused a lot more on the “simple” aspects of daily living that I had never focused on so well in the United States.
BEFORE: Christmas Eve in Villa 31 -- when being an outsider gave me an in.
In short, you could say I moved to Buenos Aires to escape the more mundane aspects of life that I wasn’t handling too well back in the USA and, very much to my surprise, what has happened is that I have come to cherish the mundane more than anything else. Family. Friends. Living in the moment. Taking care of body and mind.
Then this Human Rights Watch gig seems to fall in my lap, and that’s really exciting. But what’s particularly nice I don’t feel manic excited or super lucky or all revved up, like I’ve won the lottery or something. I just feel mellow lucky and, more than anything, I feel really lucky that it was the circuitous, couldn’t-have-predicted-that route that has brought me here. I did not get here, as so many successful people proclaim, by keeping my eye clearly on the prize. How the hell could I? I didn’t know what the prize was. I was stumbling and I still am, but this week the stumbling feels like it has a bit more grace to it.
I am writing all this by way of sharing that it is not my photography skills nor my desire to work with multimedia nor my great business skills that created this opportunity with Human Rights Watch. What really allowed me to get this job is the fact that I live in Buenos Aires, that I learned the language and that, more than anything, I can see the cultural as both an insider and an outsider. This is not only allows me to get access to the subjects and images I need but, more important, to understand what I am seeing and experiencing, and to have a sense of how to communicate to specific segments of both Argentine and American populations.
This feels very special, and my success with Human Rights Watch this week has brought this all into clear focus.
When I first arrived in Buenos Aires it was easy to make pictures of strangers. I’d just walk up to them and smile and click, click, click. A year-and-a-half after arriving (still a relatively wide-eyed stranger, if you can believe that) on Christmas Eve I walked into Villa 31 and spent the night taking pictures. Villa 31 is a “very dangers, don’t-go-there” kind of place, but I had no problem at all. Just went around smiling and click, click, clicking. It’s easy to make friends as an outsider.
Then, at some point, I stopped being able to do that. I was nervous. I the more I felt like I lived here, the more awkward I would feel taking pictures like a tourist or a foreign photojournalist. I understood what people were saying when they asked, “Why are you taking my picture?,” and my Spanish was good enough to answer back. But I didn’t have a good answer. I no longer felt comfortable paying for images with a friendly, innocent smile. It turns out that when you start to become a bit of an insider, smiling and click, click, clicking is generally frowned upon. Playing the fool is just foolish.
When I went to Hospital Alvarez to photograph for Human Rights Watch I felt completely at home. My wife-to-be works in two public hospitals and conditions that shocked me four years ago now just seem utterly, comfortably normal. (What do you call an entire hallway covered with graffiti, or another hallway stuffed with people who have been waiting in broken chairs for hours? Normal.) And while I was photographing I was able to chat casually with my subjects, making connections with more than just a smile, explaining exactly what I was up to, asking them questions to help with my reporting.
AFTER: Hospital Alvarez, maternity ward, three weeks ago -- when seeing and making an image requires the insider's perspective.
I believe in luck and serendipity. But as forces totally out of my control, I don’t believe they do me any good (or bad). I don’t bow down to them or depend on them or wax poetic about them. So if I have spent this post waxing just a bit, I want to be clear that I’m not celebrating the ability to make things happen the way I want them to happen. What I am rambling on about is just the opposite. What I am pleased with today is how I have been lucky and how I have made things happen for myself without having a very clear idea at all of where I wanted to head. I’m celebrating the fact that my image making lifestyle seems to be beginning to serve as reflection of how what is most important to me — belong to a culture and seeing it from within.
September 1st, 2010 4:58 am
Ethan,
This blog is beautifully written because it’s sincere. But I have to say that I feel many times that you can really “connect” with a people and a culture even with a language barrier and that it is possible to have an understanding if the desire is there. Many times I find people do not have a desire to really understand another culture.
Speaking of Buenos Aires – I have just spent two weeks there – knowing no Spanish and doing two stories in connection with my documentary http://openingoureyes.net. One of my subjects was a Tango therapist and the day before I left we met up with her and she told me in Spanish (translated by my daughter) that even though we couldn’t communicate through language – she felt an understanding between us. For me, that’s what it’s all about. But we both had the desire to understand – and I find that rare.