Interview by Sid Walker
This project has been well received. You've shown it in the United States and all over Mexico. It was also published at Visura magazine, which is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the photographic world. What do you think makes this work so attractive?
El Muerto is my third major project and even as I'm maturing, people are coming around to what I've been doing all along. I'm a sincere photographer with sincere images and I'm not out looking to act like an artist or impress anyone. I make the work and that's it. In a world full of bullshit, slicksters and used carpet salesman, people appreciate a straight-up guy. Like Flannery O'Connor said, "A good man is hard to find." I'm not such a great guy but I don't mince my words and I don't lie about who I am. I can't be bothered to lie and pose. Life is too short.
The introduction to the project is extremely personal and also makes references to famous, unexpected artists, Caravaggio, Velazquez. How did you become interested in painting and how do you feel about revealing yourself so deeply online?
My father was a painter. Edith Landowne, who lived around the corner in South Miami, was an astounding painter. My brother Jimmy is a talented cartoonist and animator. Noah Masterson, with whom I grew up, was always making little comic books. Non-photographic art has been part of my life since the very beginning. Growing up, I remember we had two posters in the house, one of a Van Gogh and another of a Talouse-Lautrec. But when I discovered Velazquez, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Later, I discovered Caravaggio and felt that he was one of the few artists I could really understand. I'd had a lot of brushes with the law and so had he. I was essentially unconcerned about how people viewed my work and so was he. Lately though I've been paying more attention to Abstract Expressionism, de Kooning, Rothko and Pollock, along with a guy from Miami named Kiki Valdes, who I just met.
As for the personal stuff, there were just things I had to get out. Unfortunately, there will probably be more of that. I prefer to tell other people's stories, but I have a lot of psychological and emotional baggage to deal with, like anyone, and this is how I handle it.
What has been the difference between the reception of this project, and of Ladies' Bar?
I think it's pretty obvious that the Mexican arts mafia, which gets its funding from taxpayer money, went out of its way to censor Ladies' Bar. After three years, and with the intervention of some well-placed friends, I was finally able to show it in Guadalajara late last year. It was a knockout. It made national press and I'm very pleased.
Needless to say it's a different project entirely. It's separated from Ladies' Bar by three or four years. It's not a documentary story at all. It's about life and death and surviving in between, which is the hard part. I am very pround of that project and think it's one of my best. And to some extent, it's been given the attention it deserves, which was not the case with Ladies' Bar.
What was shooting the project like?
It was done very quickly. I was traveling a lot at the time and I worked on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, in Monterrey, and Saltillo. If it took six months I'd be surprised. The basic idea was to move away from portraiture somewhat and do something with portraits, landscapes, and sort of strange still lifes. I see a lot of art history in the project, from the photograph "posts," which in some ways reminds me of a dark and strange Richard Diebenkorn, to a piece called caress, which is pure Caravaggio done on film. There's another photograph called "Bridegroom to be" that comes straight out of my lifelong love affair with Diego Velazquez' work. Teresa Parker, a curator from Chicago, was very much the producer or creative director of the project. It would have been something completely different without her help and guidance.
