MeMag - Me Magazine

From the same park as the previous shot. This is something Chileans love; a Taca-Taca. I just love that word. Let me say it again… Taca-Taca!

Here I had gone to a park with M so that she could practice her Tai-Chi with her eccentric friends. Since I don’t think it’s a good idea to hang around women with swords, I went for a walk with my camera. The sports photo from earlier is also from the same walk.

I stood for a long time here waiting for the light to turn right. This one came out a little too Keith Carter-esque. Nice, but not quite what I’m trying to do.

My absolute favourite photo of all the Chilean shots. I first wrote a long explanation of it but it’s better to leave it unexplained. This one is going on my own wall. It will be my La Gioconda.

This one is not so bad. I was thinking of the David Hockney painting Splash at the time. I thought it had a pair of legs in it but I guess it doesn’t. Which is good since I didn’t intend to copy it. I must have remembered the painting wrong. Either that or I have seen some other picture somewhere that looks similar. I’m sure somewhere there exists a photo almost exactly like this one. I still like this. For me it is an example of how sometimes things actually work out. I wanted a photo of a pair of legs sticking up. Just like this. So I stood by the pool for a while until a pair of strange legs happened by.

Another one of my personal favourites from Santiago. Just a few feet away from the store where I shot the previous photo, this woman was standing on the sidewalk with her kitten. Beeing high on adrenalin after having gotten one good image on film already, I asked her if I could take a picture, pointing to the kitten. She seemed delighted. It wasn’t perfect so I asked her for one more. She pretended to be a little annoyed but I could tell that she loved the attention.

Finally a photo that I’m very happy with. I had walked many times past this store which sold things to decorate your garden with. As I have mentioned before, in Chile they don’t have garden gnomes. They have black people. Wouldn’t you like a nice garden negro for your lawn? Of course you would. Who wouldn’t? And they’re lifesize too and always happy.

The bars in front made an obvious iconographic image. I clicked away several identical exposures just in case some accident would happen to one of the film frames in development.

The building across from the one I lived in. This should have been a photo of the girl who had just walked up the stairs minutes earlier. But I missed it, which was a shame because she made a much better subject. Her school uniform skirt blew up in the wind. It wasn’t quite as indecent as it sounds. Just a very good picture. Slightly unreal like a Noman Rockwell painting.

From my nightly walks around the neighborhood in Santiago. This is supposed to be a dog, but of course it’s really too dark to tell. Oh well. I stood for a while overlooking this scene after I had shot this, realizing that it would be impossible to make out. But it was an old dead end street which was blocked off so no cars would arrive and there were no houses nearby, only a school that was closed for the evening So I could have hung around forever and nobody else would have shown up. Maybe a white dog instead of a black one. Something always happens eventually. But at some point one must move on.

Small stencil graffiti on lamppost at Plaza Ñuñoa, Santiago de Chile.

Sports photography.

Probably the best Chilean photo so far in this series. Jaime the guitar player is searching his memory for an old song. This was at a family reunion party with people coming from many other countries and even other continents to participate. I keep telling M that with their manpower they could form their own country.

Jaime went on singing and playing for hours. He was very good. His repertoir seemed endless.

Here is one I wish I had done differently. I was only in this shoe repair shop for a minute or two and only had time to shoot one frame. What was special about this place was the incredible amount of things everywhere. So many details. By blurring everything out it lost rather than gained atmosphere.

I wish I could have been there longer. These two old men were drinking and repairing shoes. Everything was old. There was a poster of Humphrey Bogart on the wall. And piles of shoes literarily in piles.

But the old guys were drunk. One of them were grumpy and difficult and the other one I think was hitting on the woman who brought me there. M said that we had to leave because they didn’t want us there but my impression was that they wanted us there forever. Especially Susana.

This one I like more than the other recent shots from Santiago.