We don’t live in the land of plenty any more.
I turn on the television and see the queues of the unemployed.
Every few days people close to us are fired from their jobs.
I’m dissolving throughout urban wandering. A moment at a time, a shot at a time is all I can manage. The feeling that whatever I portrait turns to be unreliable haunts me, leaves me at the periphery, no matter the aesthetic prism I filter the raw material throughout, no matter my good intentions.
Most of the days, I sort the pictures trying to assemble a coherent whole, and can’t pick enough of them to tell a story, but I stubbornly try, although knowing that most of them are too private, that they spare the viewer nothing, that I shouldn’t have shown the poignant truth of human despair.
It reminds me Buenos Aires in the time of the corralito: sleepwalkers, men and women with sad and worried sick eyes, pedestrians prowling around the trash containers, skinny dogs.
Then I go to Annie Leibovitz’s photo call, and I find all this much-a-do-about-nothing about her private exhibition (Susan Sontag dying, father dying, late pregnancy, domestic snapshots of questionable intimacy and artistic value), perhaps a bit fatuous and flat in a time that claims for the dignity and sobriety of Dorothea Lange’s style of work.
I can’t help asking myself what would Susan think of this baloney if she were among us.
