Something Personal
Something Personal is a collection of brief reminiscences and opinions I tried to put them sequenced. I failed. I lose the chronological order of experiences and ideas.
Nevertheless, I decided to write them down just as exercises to keep my mind healthy. Besides memoirs and remembrances, I’ll include descriptions of new projects, so I hope this blog would be a helpful tool to motivate me to finish what I’d started.
On drawing with light
Writing and drawing are activities performed with the hands. The eye, intuition and inspiration guide, but ultimately the hands made the image according to the manipulation of instruments or materials. If photography is to write or draw with light, [...]
Time in photography
Time in photography is not so much in shooting or crafting, but in the very small shock that some images arouse, or in the extended fascination of wanting to contemplate them over and over again even knowing that there is [...]
On analogic and digital
Digital photography has not yet comforted me with the pleasures that analog photography has so far provided me. Let us agree that I am a primitive being, which is quickly and simply satisfied: the question goes through my senses. Being [...]
Cartographies of an
in-land-sailor.
This ship had been sailing for more than three decades and today, (April 2020), it’s the first time that this solitaire and absentminded sailor decided to make records, some retrospective and some recent ones. Chaotic, absurd tales from here, there, nowhere… And also brief descriptions of his imaginary sailings.
Just think of the logbook written by the captain of the Flying Dutchman: ghostly notes, vanishing details, words and pictures to be read and seen by wandering spirits, or perhaps by… you? Welcome aboard!
Guidelines
GUIDELINES On board the ship, days and nights happen without me noticing the change of light and shadow. The cabin catches me, and I'd the passage of time as I write about the next courses. I've developed a kind of [...]
Directions: The photographic drawing
I achieve my figurative message through traditional photography, using analog or digital cameras. For abstraction, I set them aside. Sometimes what people call abstractions are nothing more than images of existing things, such as textures on surfaces, portions of [...]
The dark cabin
Near the bow is the main cabin, where imagination flies at the pace of the wind, or simply sings with the waves of the port. At the stern is a secondcabin, which I call The Dark Cabin. The result of each voyage is reflected there. Maps and geographic charts, whether real or fictional, see the light in a space where light is paradoxically scarce. I don't visit that space every day. Doing so involves staying more than half the day working in reddishdarkness: the materials used there require that kind of lighting. The days designated for such work are premeditated and scheduled. As I stay in this cabin, the ship is adrift. Hours pass and at the end of the day one or more maps are finished to be shown to those people who know about my travelsand wait in a hurry in some port. To them I dedicate these rectangles of paper that will one day be as faded as my hair: there is no map or navy thatresists the onslaught of the years. The dark cabin also officiates as a Machine Room. My ship's devices are electrical and mechanical. There is no technological sophistication. Just theessentials to get to the destination: just some instruments that direct the light, and some substances that allow me to draw maps. The enlargers, radiating light from their lenses, look like headlights in the dark that, in their work of printing, guide me towards the final destination: the finished photographic chart. For this humble navigator, everything is unified there: at that moment the map and the territory are the same thing, just as the shipand the sailor are identical.
From the notebooks of Roger Ferib
On how these notebooks came to me.
A good friend of mine, the owner of one of the most emblematic bookstores in Montevideo, and who knew about my love for Photography, gifted me a collection of personal diaries and manuscripts with some pages in Spanish and other ones in English, that contained drawings, old photographs, sketches, poems, short paragraphs, signs that seemed to be part of languages I don’t know, dates, history data and maps of places I can’t recognize, among other documents and narrations.
The name of Roger Ferib is in the first page of each notebook, some of them made of wads of yellowish sheets, and some hand-sewn.
May be, the same as me, he was the heir of old documents, tales and images of anonymous ancestors. Having a not better idea, I present these records under the title “From the notebooks of Roger Ferib”.
Meetings of Roger Ferib with Photography – 1
"From what I did, most of it was lost. There are records of recent years: manuscripts, maps and sketches of my pilgrimage, and some ideas that arose when I came into contact with a recently invented technique: photography. Over [...]
2 – Ink writing
The ink-writings are the most frequent writing method used in those pages, although graphite and faded pigments made part of that disordered compilation of images and words. I have no intention to put them in chronological order; I’m just picking texts and [...]