2011-09-22. A chockfull of blogpost.
There’s a few things I’ve wanted to mention over the last few days that they have piled up in the virtual laundry list in my head, so I decided better to post it all at one time:
1. First order of business, I’m cleaning up house. I’m removing some of the older posts on this blog, which are now irrelevant, as I want this blog to contain more longer-form posts — a combination of pictures and words and thoughts. Some of these older posts will live instead in another Tumblr blog dedicated to just pictures (and a little inspiration). Click here for a sneak peek. I’ll make a more official announcement soon. In the meantime, you’re welcome to follow me there too.
2. I never got to announce the winners for the Canadian Café Bar print giveaway last week! Mr noemontescars.tumblr.com is the lucky winner on the Tumblr portion, and Ms Paris Carter on the Facebook page portion. Thank you for participating and sharing.
3. Speaking of Canadian Café Bar, today is the last day of the show. And like that, the time flew by! I’m pleased with the feedback I’ve gotten, and sometimes amused too. I got the chance to meet photographer Tony Fouhse at the opening, whose portraits of heroin users on the streets of Ottawa I really like. In fact, he’s exhibiting this body of work right after mine, at La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa. The opening reception is tomorrow evening. He also got to interview me for his awesome blog, Drool. Click here to read that interview, and also learn more about his work.
This is what the Peruvian Ambassador to Canada had to say about the show: ” ‘[I felt it] was important that the embassy … show everything about Peruvian culture, no matter how controversial or explicit the art may be. We may not like it much,’ he said referring to the subculture, ‘but it’s real.’ ” Hmm… You can read the rest of the article where that quote came from here.
Lastly, kudos to Alison Zavos of Featureshoot for her reply to a comment left on her blog’s post featuring this series. (Click here, and scroll down to read the comment and Alison’s reply.) I actually don’t mind if you agree with the comment. It’s her words that are insightful. I grapple with a desire to be original in my work, all the time. I’m sure everybody else does too. Every time I come up with something new, I’m already wondering if I “failed.”
What her comment brought home to me is that it’s the intention of the work that is important… Why am I shooting this? The point is, read the statement. I learned, while writing this statement for the project, and writing my experiences shooting the series, that if you don’t effectively explain what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it, the work falls apart. This series is true for me because I learned something new about myself in the process. Sometimes that’s all that matters.
2011-08-30. Canadian Café Bar: Last but not least, a giveaway!
This is the Seventh and Last Part in a series. (Click here to read Part Six, or here to read them all in a row.)
This is it! A brief post to announce a print giveaway in anticipation of the exhibition. And as a thank you for all the love, support and kind comments I have received over the past few weeks. I know quite a few readers are not Tumblr followers, so as a bit of an experiment, this giveaway will be two-tiered:
- For Tumblr followers, I’ll personally mail one lucky winner a signed 11x14 print from this series. All you have to do is reblog this post.
- For Non-Tumblr followers, this same post appears on my Facebook page: facebook.com/joaocanzianiphoto. I’ll mail a second signed 11x14 print to one lucky facebooker. All you have to do here is “share” this post to your profile.
One winner from each group will be picked at random by Friday September 9, 2011 - the date of the opening reception. The winner from each group cannot be the same person. The winner gets to pick the photograph of their choosing. Take a look at your choices at canadiancafebar.com!
I’ll announce the winners on Tuesday September 13.
Canadian Café Bar Opening Reception:
Friday, September 9, 2011. 7 to 10 pm.
LA PETITE MORT GALLERY
306 Cumberland Street
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada, K1N 7H9
Telephone: +1 (613) 860-1555
Email: guy@lapetitemortgallery.com
2011-08-23. Canadian Café Bar: Existential tensions.
This is the Sixth Part in a series. (Click here to read Part Five.)
” ‘[Photography], to be compelling, there must be tension in the work; if everything has been decided beforehand, there will be no tension and no compulsion to the work.’ The compulsion comes from an artist with a crisp artistic vision committed to the facts. The tension emerges from the high risk of failure.”
— Elisabeth Sussman and Tina Kukielski quoting David Levi-Strauss in the introduction to Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.
Coming in blind was probably one of the best things that happened to me. Learning to make do with the given situation and make the best of it. And to push myself until I was happy with the results or risk the failure of coming out empty-handed. Because in photography there really is the potential you could fuck up and come up with nothing. If I was an architect I’m sure I’d have a couple of crumbling buildings here and there.
This risk has such a toxic allure, because if you do succeed (by whichever way you define success), the high you get from it is just too good. The feeling I get at the end of a shoot cancels out the anxiety I started with before - an anxiety that I’ve found is actually a good thing; if one channels it appropriately it can be a powerful motivator. This feeling also builds something in me… it continually makes me who I am.
Which is the reason why I must shoot relatively often. Otherwise, I stagnate.
I remember often starting a little disappointed. I was never quite happy with the girls Erika had arranged for me. Yet, I was humbled by the fact that I had to surrender to the situation if I wanted something out of it. My hands were tied. I discovered something very valuable in this constraint: “Ugliness,” as in beauty, is a relative term. It fluctuates.
I used to think the phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” a clichéd piece of bullshit, because it’s a simplistic statement that doesn’t explain the whole picture. As human beings we can immediately recognize between beauty and ugliness. The real good stuff is what happens in between these extremes, because to me it is all steeped in the psychology of human interaction.
My ultimate perception of Erika turned out to be quite different than when I first met her. My first impression was that she was ugly (itself such an ugly and incontrovertible statement). But despite her motivations, what she gave me in pictures was something quite sensual. I discovered that with a little charm, kindness, and openness, the inner beauty of these girls sort of “flowered” to the surface.
It is possibly the best training for a photographer: to be locked up in a somewhat darkened room with someone you haven’t met before, resist any temptations to get physical, and instead allow them to reveal something you are privileged to witness at that particular place and moment in time. It’s a pretty cool thing that this can be captured in a photograph too, to be shared and hopefully comprehended by other human beings.
Next week I will post Part 7, which may very likely be the last part in this series. Thank you for reading and for all your support.
Oh! and if you didn’t already know, you can take a look at this series in its own dedicated website: canadiancafebar.com (Or click either image above.)
2011-08-18. Canadian Café Bar… now has a home in the clouds.
Yessir! Click here or the image above. Exclusively on canadiancafebar.com
The opening reception for this series is Friday, September 9 from 7 to 9 pm, at La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa, Canada. The exhibition will be up from September 9 to 22.
Why Ottawa, you ask? Well, this show wouldn’t be possible without the kind support of the Peruvian Embassy in Canada. Also, a few beautiful coincidences: I lived in Canada for 10 years. I’m from Lima, Perú. The bar happens to be called Canadian Café Bar. What could be more fitting?
I’m missing my high school reunion (in Vancouver) for this… So, I hope to see you there too.
Love,
João
2011-08-15. Canadian Café Bar: A small miracle.
This is the Fifth Part in a series. (Click here to read Part Four.)
Ugly… She’s ugly. I feel like an asshole for thinking this. But that was what was going through my head at the time. Luis and I met Erika at the Canadian Café Bar, where she was working that night. After the constant and seemingly futile battle of trying to find girls to shoot, I was hoping she would be as attractive as some of the other girls I noticed. She didn’t exactly inspire trust either. After exchanging a few words, I got the impression all she wanted was to make a quick buck.
I decided to let go and see what happens. Erika and I came up with a plan. I would pay each girl that would pose for me, and I would pay Erika a “finder’s fee.” (Forget about shooting them for free.) She would call me when she’d start finding some girls. In the meantime, Luis and I drove around the city in search of inexpensive and interesting hotel rooms that I could shoot them at. As with Karla, shooting them at their homes was out of the question.
In retrospect I think I waited a day or two, but at the time I thought she was never going to call. I started asking pretty much everybody I knew for possible leads or ideas. What started as a simple search on escort services sites ended up with me looking at Peruvian porn. At the time I wasn’t married to the idea of just shooting the girls from the bar. That just seemed to be the most practical. The bar and the girls that worked in it were real, as opposed to the other ideas that started popping in my head. (Like, what about doing a series on the female traffic cops in Lima? I always thought them to be sexy and intimidating…)
Erika did call after all. This was no talent search with headshots and all. Luis and I had to pick up Erika at her place and then pick up the girls she had found for me without knowing how they looked like. I suppose this was exhilarating, having that element of surprise. But when she got in the car, Erika informed us that the girls she had found had changed their minds at the last minute. A raging monster started developing inside me. She frantically got on her phone.
After a couple of phone calls she managed to convince someone. Maybe who she found was her backup plan - someone she hadn’t considered before. It didn’t matter; now we drove across town with purpose.
Her name was Milagros. I explained what I wanted to do as I sized her up. I liked how she looked, but in my head I was trying to determine whether she’d be good - whether there’ll be chemistry between us. The thing is, you can never really tell until you go through with it. It turned out to be a really good exercise, coming in blind and seeing what I could do with the situation.
That day I shot Milagros and then I shot Erika. Even though I felt as if I had put my body through the wringer, I felt really good at the end, and a little bit of relief. I did it! And perhaps this was the beginning of something. Photography like this is an addiction. Now I wanted more.
Next week I will post Part 6 with more images from the series, and a little bit on how they came about. Reblog, repost, spread the word! Until then, have a great week.
To be continued …
2011-08-08. Canadian Café Bar: El famoso Luis.
This is the Fourth Part in a series. (Actually, more like an Intermission. Click here to read Part Three.)
I introduce to you my good friend Luis Albarracín. Taxi driver, fixer, travel companion. Without him this project wouldn’t have been possible, and many of the photographs I’ve taken in Lima in the last couple of years wouldn’t have been quite the same… Not to mention my experiences shooting them. A friend on Facebook asked me if I had any pictures of Luis, after I was talking about him so much. Here you go, Frank. (By the way, this picture is not part of the Canadian Café Bar series.)
A much shorter post today I’m afraid. All the non-stop travel of the past few weeks has finally taken a toll on me, and after being out shooting on location all day yesterday, my brain is just too fried to write anything longer and more meaningful than what I’m writing right now. I promise to come back full-strength next week.
Next week I will post Part 5 with more images from the series, and a little bit on how they came about. And remember, the opening reception for Canadian Café Bar is Friday, September 9 from 7 to 9 pm, at La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa, Canada.
To be continued …
2011-08-01. Canadian Café Bar: Erika, my “human trafficker”
This is the Third Part in a series. (Click here to read Part Two.)
I’m like honey to the flies. I walk through the room and all the women’s heads are turning. I rarely get to experience this, and yeah, it feels good. Luis, my taxi guy, and I sit down at a high table. Two or three women approach. “Would you like a drink?” one of them asks. So I buy us a round.
I pull out a promo piece of mine, the one that has the portrait of Morgan Freeman, for maximum effect. (Although when I’ve shown this card in some foreign countries, the reaction I sometimes get is, “Oh, you shot Nelson Mandela!”) I explain to them that I’m a photographer and am interested in shooting their portraits. In fact, I tell them, it’s a more “intimate” portrait, with lingerie, or possibly nude. I’m willing to pay!
They flee as if I’ve just insulted their mothers. Luis looks at me disappointingly. He tells me what is now blatantly obvious. I can’t just bluntly ask them like that! I have to approach this with some subtlety and finesse.
This is the Canadian Café Bar, just a block away from El Haiti, in Miraflores. Luis and I found out, this is where Karla used to work. It’s been a few months since I shot her, so now she’s moved on. I had hoped she would help me get an in with her co-workers, but she told me she doesn’t keep in touch with them anymore, and is too busy studying. She worked at the bar to pay for her school.
I take a deep breath. Ok, I guess we have to dig deeper into our field research. We decide to approach a couple of cute girls and buy them a drink. Wow, the drinks for girls are four or five times as much as ours. And they’re not allowed to drink beers or anything else but this weird concoction that appears to be a viscous fruit punch and a little crappy liquor. We sit on some sofas towards the back of the room.
A few beers later I’ve sort of forgotten the true nature of this place. I’m feeling really good from all the flirting and attention I’m getting, despite the fact this feeling of pleasure has been artificially created and is not coming from any pickup talents I may have possessed. I explain to the girl I’m with what I want to do. This time it goes a little better. She tells me she can help me out. She can hook me up with other girls that may be interested. “Memorize my number,” she tells me. “Because if the security guys see us writing anything down then I’ll get in very big trouble.” I look around and I notice a few big burly guys throughout the club. They’re not talking to anybody but are looking at the girls instead, and the boys talking to them. I have pretty bad memory, so I immediately go to the bathroom and write the phone number on a piece of paper.
Luis and I end up staying till last call. Just before they turn the lights on, I notice a few people making out. But as the male patrons start leaving, none of the girls are going with them. Instead, the girls head towards the back where we just were and start rearranging the furniture. Some of them sit on the floor while others lie on the sofas. We later find out that the girls are not allowed to leave until dawn, to avoid them hooking up with any of the men waiting outside.
The next day I call the number the girl gave me. No answer. I call a few more times and I leave a message. The next couple of days I didn’t hear back from her, so I attempt again. Nothing. I’m pissed and I don’t know what to do. I was trying not to think of all the money I had spent that night, buying the girls those expensive fruit punches.
“I may just have the girl for you,” Luis tells me over the phone. ” I gave this girl a ride and she happens to work at the club. I explained what you’re trying to do. She’s willing to help you out. But you’re gonna have to pay her… Her name is Erika.”
Next week I will post Part 4 with more images from the series, and a little bit on how they came about. Reblog, repost, spread the word! Until then, have a great week.
To be continued …
2011-07-25. Canadian Café Bar: This is Karla
This is the Second Part in a series. (Click here to read Part One.)
I met her at El Haiti, a café facing a park in Miraflores. It’s been there for as long as I can remember. The waiters are these bowtie-wearing old men, and I’m pretty sure they’ve been working there since the Seventies. According to my mom, my grandfather used to sit there for hours and watch the girls go by. He also wore a cravate and had a butler at home make him martinis or scotch on the rocks. But he’s gone now.
It was a pleasant conversation. I excitedly told her my ideas and she seemed to be into them. But it wasn’t until the very end she mentioned I would have to pay her if I wanted her to do what I was asking. This wasn’t exactly Model Mayhem. I discovered that a photographer-model collaboration wasn’t a concept known in Peru. She wasn’t interested in bartering. Money was the bottom line, and all that mattered to her.
Luis and I picked her up near her house and took her to a hotel I had previously scouted. My wish was to shoot her in her home - for her to be in her environment. But this was not possible lest we risk grandma’s disapproval or corrupt her younger siblings.
She told me she couldn’t get fully naked for me because her work contract prevented her from doing so. I was guessing her work was this place she had shot the calendar for. What is this place? I imagined it to be some sort of strip joint, but that wasn’t quite it.
Karla and I went into the room I had rented for a couple of hours while Luis sat in the hallway. She said she was going to take a shower to freshen up. I started setting up the 4x5 camera and the Mamiya RZ while she took off her clothes and stepped into the bathroom. She came out in her underwear and her hair was still wet. We began our session on the bed.
After a little while, the aforementioned contract no longer seemed to matter. She didn’t mind taking her bra off, and she didn’t seem to mind when I touched her gently in order to explain to her the pose I wanted. Her skin was smooth and cold. At that moment I thought of the camera as a defense mechanism, placed between us to protect us from each other (but at times more like it protecting me from her). She wasn’t exactly pretty, but in this setting, she had a sensuality that aroused my senses.
She asked me if I had a girlfriend. I said yes. She was impressed I wasn’t making any advances. Most boys would be even if they were married, she said. Believe me - I thought to myself - I am very close. At that moment there is no future and no past. Only the heightened desire of the present, blind to consequences. Any relationship at home becomes a vague and distant memory. I swear a part of our brains are directly wired to the devil’s mainframe.
Honestly I felt it was a rhetorical question. Our time together could have gone that way had I wanted to. But I’ve never paid for sex or anything close to it. In fact, the idea of doing so intimidates me a little bit. If you read Latin American literature you’ll get the impression that every father takes their boy to the whorehouse when they become of age. It’s all part of that Latin patriarchal tradition. Part of that cocky machismo I see a lot of Latin men possess. I suppose the act of taking your son to a prostitute, devoid of other cultural motives, is the simple desire to teach your son to overcome a very real (and overwhelmingly exciting) fear. My dad, being a more sensitive, modern, and liberal man - and mind you, non-religious - never took me.
Next week I will post Part 3 with more images from the series, and a little bit on how they came about. Until then, have a great week.
To be continued …
2011-07-18. Canadian Café Bar: It all starts here.
I’ve always wanted to shoot nudes. It seems every photographer shoots them, almost. But not because of that. I came to it by accident. In fact, I stumbled upon it. It, or rather, she, presented herself nude right in front of my eyes.
I was down in Lima for a few reasons. I was visiting family, and on assignment for Travel & Leisure. Plus I was starting a personal project on my hometown, which I’ve briefly mentioned before, called Ciudad Natal. Luis, the taxi driver I hired for my T&L assignment was such a gregarious and trustworthy guy that I thought he would be a good partner-in-crime for my own project. So each morning he picked me up, and we roamed the city wherever we pleased. Some days were fruitful, others not so much. We beat the shit sometimes, sat at a café when the mood struck, or stopped for lunch at some hole-in-the-wall cevichería.
One particularly bleak and foggy morning we were driving by the shore when I spotted something peculiar in the distance. Some sort of photo shoot taking place on a secluded patch of big rocks. If you blinked as you drove by, you missed it. But on the passenger seat, I felt like an owl looking everywhere around me for anything interesting. Funny when you see a naked woman outdoors. I think men can instinctually spot them from miles away… All those years of growing up shielded from seeing naked breasts in public and then you go backpacking in Europe and they’re everywhere and your eyes pop out!
I told Luis to stop the car, and I quickly stepped out and took the 4x5 out of the trunk. I set it up on the tripod and pointed it at them. They noticed us immediately, as the girl covered herself up. I felt like a pervert. But I already knew this could be a really good shot, and I’m a stubborn individual, so… We stayed.
I decided to hike down the little hill towards them. I wanted to let them know my intentions. That I was a professional photographer, not a pervert.
(Which reminds me of a funny conversation I had with a couple of other photographers. Most photographers are perverts deep down. Yet the bigger the camera, the more you can get away with it. Case in point: shooting a nude with a small digital camera looks like you’re shooting pornography. Whereas shooting with a large format film camera? Well, that’s called art. So all you photographers wanting to shoot your sexy girls with your 5D, do yourself a favor and trade it in for an 8x10.)
Well, they seemed very annoyed. I had interrupted their sexy shoot, and no matter how upstanding and civil I looked, they still thought I was some kind of pervert. I was wise enough to have shot a polaroid beforehand, so I showed it to them. “Look,” I said. “It’s not really about you, but about the landscape, and you in it.” I think they saw that big-ass camera and they thought it was some huge zoom. (There goes that argument for a big camera.) ”No, no, no, it’s a 4x5 film camera, like one of those old-school cameras you see the old men shooting your portrait for money in the park.”
It took a bit of convincing. I showed them some of my work. At the end I got my shot (click on the image above; you must see it large to truly appreciate it - it’s large format after all.). They explained to me that they were doing a calendar shoot for the place they worked at, but they didn’t want to reveal quite what that place was. My curiosity was piqued a little, but I was more interested in the girl. So I asked her if she wanted to pose for me some other time. She said sure. Little did I know that that would also take a bit of convincing and negotiation later on.
The image above is not part of the series I’m about to introduce. But without it I wouldn’t have been able to shoot the others, and wouldn’t have been able to enter the weird and fascinating world that is Canadian Café Bar.
I’m very pleased to announce, under the kind auspices of the Peruvian Embassy in Canada, that this series will be exhibited at La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa from September 9 to 22. The opening reception is Friday September 9th from 7 to 9 pm. I will be in attendance of course, so please save the date.
This is the First Part in a series. Next week I will post Part 2 with the first couple of images from the series. I’ll tell you how they came about too. Until then, have a great week. And spread the word!
To be continued …
