Caras de mi Barrio

I Finally go off my culo and started taking pictures of the people who live in my neighborhood. I have been talking about this for probably as long as I have lived here. And as always things are different once you dive in.

My new art buddy Alissa and I hit the streets in search of those denizens of Sants that have always caught my eye. Alissa, is from Portland, Oregon, lives on the other side of the block from me and is here doing a documentary about Angolan children who are victims of land mines. Is it strange that another Portland filmmaker who shares the friendship of a certain accordionist happens to live a half a block away from me in this very off the radar neighborhood of Barcelona? Yep. Very.

Anyway I talked Alissa into going along for two reasons:

1. After wandering around the Saharawi camps alone with a camera and in general practicing "art" by myself I thought it would be more fun to do something like this with somebody else. It was.

2. Ultimately I am a coward and a single guy going up to strangers with a camera and asking to take their picture usually doesn't work and is... for the single guy, kinda scary. Like the Mormon missionaries, the little old lady Jehovah´s Witnesses and cops, 2 is better. Enough with the brave thing.

The parameters were these. Stop anybody I thought looked "interesting" and shoot out one 36 exposure roll. Yep... film!

Even with the two for us our refusal rate was about 90%. But what we did get is pretty amazing.

I have to be honest that for this project the people I had in mind were the snarly old ladies that have completely destroyed my usually positive opinions of old people and ruined my hope for aging gracefully. We did indeed start out asking these golden agers but as one would expect they were not interested and many of which expressed the same generosity of spirit that they demonstrate at the vegetable stand at my mercado... But the people who did agree had a quality that was open and in it's own way beautiful. OK I am drawn to how do we say this... interesting looking people. This is not about shooting babes in bikinis this is about shooting people with strange noses, big ears and odd tuffs of facial hair... and that's just the ladies. But there was something behind these strange and remarkable faces and oh so not perfect bodies. There was the man whose son had downs syndrome, the guy white haired guy with the dew lap, gucci shades and his shirt open to his navel, the beautiful very, very old man with a cane who seemed to be thankful for every painful step he was taking. The capper was 87 year old Maria Sanchez and her daughter Francesca. At first Francesca was suspicious and for some reason kept running back into the carniceria that we were in front of. But soon she returned and told the story of her son who has leukemia and there search for a bone marrow doner. It turns out Francesca is a professora at the University of Barcelona and they have found someone with a bone marrow match someplace in the United States but they can't locate his exact position. She was holding back the tears.

The thing about Spain is that everything thing is just below the surface. It's sometimes a hard surface but it's brittle so you can just tap it and you are in to another world. I guess the task of taking somebody's picture is all that is needed to break through. I'll put the pictures up on flickr as soon as get them processed and scanned.