JESUS RODRIGUEZ VELASCO: Search this website 

YOU ARE IN: Imagines

You can also check a Spanish version of this project. If you are curious about what's going on with this work, then you can read a post about these preliminary movements . If your curiosity happens to grow bigger, be sure that I will be posting more details and essays in the future, and that you can simply subscribe to this site RSS. Also, if you want to participate, you can either leave a comment or send me an email to the account I have set up for this.

^Years ago, I had the uncanniest idea. Well, perhaps it was not the uncanniest, but at least rather odd. After spending a full day examining Francisco de Goya's portrait of Jovellanos, I conceived the possibility of telephoning all of my scholarly friends and asking them to be Jovellanos, or to interpret Jovellanos, in their own work space, so that I could take their picture. They would decide how they would dress, and all the paraphernalia on top of their desks, as well as gestures, the letter -or whatever they would want to have- in their hand, and so on. As for me, I would make all the technical decisions regarding film, development, enlargement, etcetera. That was a time in which I didn't even think that I would ever have a digital camera. I had my film cameras (wonderful cameras with amazing lenses), and my fully equiped darkroom.

I managed to call some of my closest friends, and I was surprised at the good mood and disposition with which they were willing to answer my request. I was so extremely happy, that I finally dropped the project and concentrated on screwing up my life for good. Which, naturally, I did very well. Now I don't mind, but at the moment it was pretty hard.

This is more or less the prehistory of the project I wish to tell you about today. This one is completely new, a perfectly different idea, although it has some vague resemblances, or, as the 16th-and-17th-Century Spanish painters would say, "tiene sombras y lejos". It is quite appropriate to invoke the painters here, for they are also going to be some of the main characters of this short-long story.

The process looks quite simple. The model -you- must chose a portrait, any painted portrait. Let's say Jovellanos by Goya, Giovanna Tornabuoni by Ghirlandaio, Gertrude Stein by Picasso, or whoever you want. Study it. Consider becoming a portrait; that particular portrait. It's not about the pose, or, in general, about the formal, external adequacy between painting and modelling. You can become a portrait, but I shall not become the painter, I shall not direct you. I shall not ask you to just look like the portrait. The project is more intellectually engaging than a simple attempt reproduce, represent, or repeat a given image. That, frankly, would be uninteresting.

The dialogue is only a way to tell a story -or to produce history in the dark times, if you allow me to use the concepts very recently created by Enrique Gavilán -so recently that they have not yet been published. The essay intends to explore the presence of the portrait, both intellectual and moral, both aesthetical and political, both historical and cultural. That's also why I will ask you to talk about it. Our meeting will ideally last for four or five hours. You must consider that only installing the lights and the background wherever you want me to go to do the portrait, will take approximately half an hour, and nearly the same time to unsintall everything. During this time, we need to be able to talk about the painting, about your experience becoming that particular portrait, about all the other portraits you left behind, about the reenactment, about the onerous presence of the portrait and how you struggle at the same time to become this painting and to remain, or even vindicate your own self-fashioning. Besides, we need to take several tens of photographs with different technical settings, in order to have a wide array of pictures to work on.

I, then, will work on my own. In the solitude of my studio, that some would call a grotto -and it's true that it quite looks like one, a wild one. I will carefully edit the pictures, taking some and discarding the others, with only the advice of my own particular muse, if by any chance she decides to visit me. At the same time I work on the pictures, I will also be working on the way you explained your experience -our conversation-, and the way I myself understood, felt, thought, the whole process, since the moment we first contacted to the moment I got the picture isolated among the other pictures, and standing alone as the piece I will deem to be the right one. This decision, the final picture, and the final text, are my exclusive responsibility. I will be the sovereign in my grotto. Do not expect me to be faithful to your words, do not expect me to be faithful to anything. Non serviam. This is not a documentary or a reportage.

You might have some questions. Simply ask them. Even if I don't know you, I am interested in working on this project with you. And, of course, I am interested in all your questions.

Some important details that I would not like to hide from you.

1. This is a photo-literary project in which I intend to work during the next three years. It's a slow project. I can be working for months on a single picture, and, more rarely, days or weeks. Some pictures have taken me years. This whole project is going to take three (3) years.

2. At the end, I would like to prepare a book. In this book, I will make a selection of all the pictures. Some will make it, some won't. No matter what happens, you will receive, for your collaboration, an archival-museum print of your picture, plus, if it is finally produced, a copy of the book.

3. Before starting the photographic session, you will sign a contract according to which you allow me to publish the photograph and/or exhibit it. If you don't feel like signing this contract, you probably should not contact me. This is particularly important.

4. None of us, neither you nor me, will get any kind of monetary or other economic benefit form this work. If the book is finally published, all the possible benefits will go to a non-governmental organization dedicated to medical aid. I will decide the NGO that will receive the benefits. All the benefits with no exception, will go to this NGO. Every single penny. By the same token, you won't be able to claim any benefit nor to be paid for being photographed.