Last House

I took all the pic­tures in Guatemala with a small Leica dig­i­tal cam­era at my waist. I assumed the cam­era saw about what I was see­ing and fired hun­dreds of frames. Any street pho­tog­ra­pher uses this tech­nique. Hav­ing a small black, non­de­script cam­era helps. What I sac­ri­fice in not hav­ing the big Nikon is returned in the expres­sions. The peo­ple in this door­way were look­ing at me look­ing at them. They were not look­ing at the cam­era or even a guy with a cam­era. I wanted to look at peo­ple on the other side of the world – and make the pic­ture while I did. If I had a cam­era at my eye this would not feel the same to me. Almost any hand held cam­era works for this includ­ing your phone. The next time you walk any­where take out the cam­era you have with you and make as many pic­tures as you can. See what you are see­ing in the mall. What if you move a lit­tle closer to the peo­ple you pass and force them to look at you. Take that photo. I stood straight in front of this fam­ily and after a bit I waved and smiled, but not before we just looked at each other.

This was the last house before the ceme­tery. The crypts were brighter than this shack and yet there was a broom just out of the frame of this pic­ture and if these peo­ple were like every other fam­ily I saw, they swept the dirt often. These are poor peo­ple but not peo­ple who don’t care. They are not checked out, way­ward or addicted. They are the same as any­one else who cares for them­selves, their fam­i­lies; they only have less money. We are the same in most ways. I just have every thing I could imag­ine and they have fewer things. They love the same.

These are the peo­ple I saw in the clin­ics and oper­ated on while I was in Guatemala. They are gen­er­ally short, mocha col­ored, smooth skinned and very beau­ti­ful to look at. I spent a lot of time just look­ing at the dif­fer­ence in their skin and bones and hair com­pared to mine. I had an odd sen­sa­tion of being on a dif­fer­ent planet and look­ing at every­thing in won­der. I love that. I love it that I allow myself to soak those visu­als in and not turn away. Because of that my cam­era finds frames I like to look at. Sim­ple as that. The tech­ni­cal parts of pho­tog­ra­phy fol­low my will­ing­ness to look the same way that a chef’s abil­ity to layer fla­vors fol­lows her will­ing­ness to let the fla­vors linger.

I loved being a 6’4” gringo in the land of the short peo­ple (the kids called me grandote – look it up: the “ote” suf­fix in Span­ish makes an adjec­tive take on par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter­is­tics). Loved it because peo­ple would turn to look and then I could freely look back, like the voyeur I am. Many Guatemalans are inti­mately woven to their Mayan roots. The bright clothes: jun­gle green, cockscomb red, sun-at-ten a.m. yel­low com­bined to make par­rot col­ored skirts and blouses; flat facial fea­tures, skin pulled smooth over demure cheek­bones, and brown, end­less eyes; incred­i­ble endurance with broad flat feet car­ry­ing them up to twenty miles to see us the in clinic – car­ry­ing the cry­ing baby girl with cleft palate to see Dustin, the Amer­i­can plas­tic sur­geon, who would rein­vent her mouth so she could suck and grow; small hands with very gen­tle hand­shakes com­bined with ready smiles in greet­ing. Maybe I made it up but I don’t care…felt like I could feel that Mayan lin­eage in their touch. I can feel what I made up it was, now, as they look at me from these dark door­ways, in my cam­era, in this frame, on this screen, in my mind, in my heart, that’s where.