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Photographs by Marcos LĂłpez, text by Josefina Licitra
Translated by Ted O’Callahan

I

A man with small hands in the Mexico City airport carries a mermaid under his arm. She is a large piece of handicraft — surely five feet long — her curves have the rough look of something sketched by a child. This Mexican mermaid doesn’t have a narrow waist, shimmering haunches, or breasts decorously covered by long blonde tresses. She has only the strange exuberance of a stiff tail. And a curl of crimson on her lips.

“Take care of my mermaid, please,” begs the man as he passes her into the hands of the airport personnel. The Mexican mermaid smiles foolishly, at anyone, at no one, as she disappears — silent — among the bags bound for Buenos Aires.

II

Marcos LĂłpez is in his house. To reach him you must pass through an iron doorway, ascend a long marble staircase, and pick a path past a skateboard, a birthday hat, and a pair of deflated balloons. At the end of all this waits a man with a compact body and small hands: he is surrounded.

Surrounded by himself.

Marcos López’s home is a wildfire. There is something scandalously alive in this rambling old house dressed up in mirrors, photos, sculptures. There are red rabbits.

“I had to leave where I’m from to be able to have a house like this. Now, though, if I want a pink wall with flowers, that’s what I have. And if I want to hang a red rabbit on the wall, I put it up. And if I want a mermaid, I can have that too. But it wasn’t easy. It took me thirty years to reach this point.”

Marcos López, fifty-one years old, three decades in photography, traveling lecturer, educational libertine, author of a body of work that does not fit in five books, nor in more than forty exhibitions (individual and collective), nor in a trophy case of prizes. Marcos López, a slight, graying man with hands like baby squid, owner of a stiff, imperfect mermaid offering her sweetly infamous smile from one wall of the living room. To the side — the side of the mermaid — is a print of the photograph “The Director’s Birthday” — part of his essay Creole Sub-Realism (2000) — and in the space between the mermaid and the photograph a good part of the this man’s past and present is summed up.

“My hometown, my adolescence, my sexual coming of age, and my moral precepts, familial and cultural: everything that I fled from is summed up in that photo.”

There is a theme to the photograph — the deadly rigidity of institutions — ornamented with the symbols of celebration — pennants, balloons, two-tier cakes — that lend the scene a particularly bitter flavor for him. Although it was taken in Buenos Aires, Marcos knows that the photo speaks of Santa Fe, the province — located to the northwest of Buenos Aires —where he was born and raised. The place he resisted until he could leave it.

The son of an engineer and a school teacher, Marcos spent his childhood and adolescence walking to the rhythm of the backwater morality of provincial towns. First he lived in GĂĄlvez, a farming and ranching town. At thirteen, he moved with his family to the city of Santa Fe. Marcos has memories of those years. He remembers the sailing club and himself on the great terrace, watching the roller-skating classes, ecstatically contemplating the bodies of the girls while the sun sank and everything glowed orange.

“Papa, I want to take roller-skating lessons.”

His father says, “one of these days,” then convinces him otherwise. Marcos decided then not to reveal his other fantasy: he wanted to put on a pink tutu, to dance classical ballet, to float in the spongy limbo of his own ideas. It’s not that Marcos is gay: he was peculiar. But in the world of the provinces, being peculiar is more or less equivalent to choosing a life of crime.

In a matter of days, the family decided that Marcos would be a sportsman. They sent him to play rugby — he went with his classmates from the parochial school. Then basketball, tennis; they forced him to spend endless afternoons at the Jockey Club (a place of aged aristocrats, one more worn than the last); and soon enough the memories that Marcos has of those times were formed: the memory of a damp city. A city locked in eternal winter.

And then something happened. It was 1978. It was the soccer World Cup — in the midst of a military dictatorship — and all of Argentina screamed for the six impossible goals scored on Peru. But Marcos, from the lowest tier of the stadium, watched something else. Just meters away were the photographers. They paced the sidelines, slung with cameras, vests, credentials; he followed the urgent choreography of lens changes, handling the latest model equipment roughly but with certainty: this was the masculine ideal in action.

“Wanting to be one of them,” he says, “was like wanting to be the blond model of the Camel cigarette ads.”

From there, Marcos studied engineering for five years with the certainty that the only thing that mattered to him was taking photos. They were, he swears, good images. Or they were at least the result of exquisite intuition: Marcos knew how to frame a picture, to compose, to solve the relations between figure and ground, to have a discussion with light with the same naturalness that other people are said to speak with God.

“Because of that, I say it is difficult to teach someone to compose a photograph. Nobody taught me.”

The only thing Marcos studied formally was engineering, and he left that in the last year of the degree. Later he made up the classes. In 1978, he heard about the first Latin American Photography Colloquium, in Mexico City, and there he found a model to follow. Six years later, in 1984, he learned the second colloquium was to be in Havana. He went without an invitation. But at that point he formed the NĂșcleo de Autores FotogrĂĄficos along with: Eduardo Grossman, Eduardo Gil, AtaĂșlfo Perez Aznar, Hellen Zout and Oscar Painter, among others. At that point he knew that, despite such a dissolute beginning, he had teachers.

“Clearly, I’ve had teachers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was my teacher at Cuba’s film school. I hold a spot for him among the saints. Pino Solanas (film director and Argentine Peronist politician) has also been my teacher; I was his assistant for an entire year. I admire that he works and works, that he believes in things, that he talks about the problems of the railroads from twenty-five years ago. My dad also passed that honesty and belief in hard work on to me. And I also feel Graciela Iturbide, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Sebastiao Salgado, Antonio Berni, Diego Rivera were all influences. But there are things that are not taught. Because of that, in workshops that I give, I can feel uncomfortable.”

“What makes you uncomfortable?”

“Part of this work is ultimately transpersonal. There are feelings inside us from birth or even before. I believe that. And for that reason I do not like to teach classes. What can I say to someone? A while back, in a master’s of photography program at the Universidad Nacional in Bogota I had to say to a student, “These landscapes are bad. At this level you can’t just bring in four landscapes. Get yourself fired up or you won’t be getting a master’s from this workshop.” But at the same time: How do you teach someone to compose a shot or to use color? When I give classes, I end up spouting all sorts of barbarities, and my students basically end up frozen.”

“Now you are not teaching?”

“Not in Argentina, but in other countries.”

“That way nobody can come looking for you?”

“Exactly! I go to Colombia for three days, I do my thing pum, pum, pum; I leave the students stupefied and flee to Mexico, from there on to Peru. I have the snake oil salesman’s approach; disappear before the customers realize what they have bought. I actually like myself in the role of a salesman. Have you seen in the Andes how people come down from the mountains to the valleys to sell handicrafts to the tourists? Well, I sell my crafts to museums and art galleries.”

“Are you a snake oil salesman?”

“In certain way, yes.”

His last sales call was the Art Book Fair in Mexico City. He dazzled the visitors and fled to the airport, with a mermaid under his arm.

Marcos López with the Mexican mermaid under his arm © Marcos López

III

His first book of photos was called Portraits; it was in black and white and published in 1993. After that, Marcos made a drastic change: the same year Portraits was published, he changed to color and began to work on a series titled “Buenos Aires, The City of Joy” (which was included in Pop Latino, published by La Marca in 2000). Once that change had taken place, it became quite easy to recognize a Marcos López photo. Because its aesthetic is theatrical — at times using the sheen of advertising photography — and because in the space between those vibrant colors, those saccharine carnival scenes, there is — as with remarkable poems — a hint of language that can’t be spoken. And in the case of Marcos López that language is uncomfortable, furious, suffocating.

Some critics have said that his photos are the best documentation of Argentina’s unsettled days under Carlos Menem. That the pain of the era was only truly visible in Marcos’ scenes where behind the happy masks is death itself, naked and hidden.

“It was not a deliberate decision, the one to document Menem-ism. Those photos reflect the spirit of the misfortune, of a painted cardboard country. I am like a theater director designing a scene, setting the shot within a pictorial space. I also constantly instructing the digital retoucher to modify the colors based on the set I created.”

“This sort of work drastically modifies the meaning of ‘documentary’ in photography.”

“‘Documentary’ has changed. In fact, in Mexico I saw a black and white documentary photo essay about migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras going to the United States through Mexico. Obviously it is an odyssey, they’re assaulted, they’re killed
 But, truthfully, a piece that I see on CNN flipping through channels at three in the morning may say a lot more to me than these ten photos. I am throwing meat to the lions here. I’ll be attacked for saying this, but think about it, with a G9 and a ten megapixel card you can shoot fifteen minutes in hi-res with audio. What’s the sense of showing documentary photography in a museum or a gallery or exhibit hall?”

“You’re saying that it isn’t still possible to capture a moment
”

“Clearly. We’re not still shooting for the melancholic club at Life. I mean: the photos that brave photographer took, which surely required a year spent risking his life on the Mexican border, are cancelled out when I come across something just as powerful on late-night television, where the subjects of the documentary speak directly to me, the sound is perfect, and I understand the issue immediately. So, because of that, documentary photography done by people like Eugene Smith or Salgado no longer interests me.”

“What interests to you?”

“Not letting them break my mermaid. My central preoccupations are essentially poetic: fragility and the absurd. Because, to be honest, I have no intention of getting within fifteen kilometers of the Mexican border, right? I might go to a five-star hotel to shoot from the window with a telephoto lens. I’m just clarifying that, so no one can say that Marcos López is talking out his ass. And again, to be clear, this conversation is happening in the middle of the day not at four in the morning.”

IV

In Gálvez, when he was a boy, his mother was a teacher. One of her duties was to write the speeches for the Independence Day celebrations. Marcos remembers Sundays, the late afternoon  —  the smell of food being prepared for the evening meal, the shock when it was time to do homework, one of his grandmothers talking, and his mother, on edge, writing a speech and saying that she was a neurasthenic. “Nobody knew what a “neurasthenic” was. We remember so many things and still don’t understand them.”

The next day, accompanied by a neighbor or the maid, Marcos and his sister would go to school with their hair and clothes carefully done, to listen to the speech. Marcos remembers that it was always cold. The cold cut through the traditional dances and the pericones fans, the voice of his mother in front of the microphone, the kisses from old ladies, the scent of chocolate. The mother country became that rare tension between the discomfort of the bad weather and the excesses of the outer provinces.

“I believe that those scenes were the germ of my work — the aesthetics of the school pageants and the fragrances of some of the women who took care of us.”

“In one of your texts you write that you can only think in colors. Why?”

“Because I forgot how to think in black and white, the way other photographers manage to. And because I believe that the color gives more nuance to my opinions. I’m interested in showing the violence and inequality of Latin America, on the one hand, and the joy on the other. A few days ago, Maria Bethania said in a television documentary that samba is made of sadness, that it is more complex than the favelas or Rio de Janeiro itself. In the same way, I speak of my pains, my deaths, and my battles like a late-night Andy Warhol, in his undertow of cheap tequila. I’m interested in reappraising our Latin America wildness, our way of thinking and aesthetic expression full of a personality that doesn’t have to ask permission of anybody. I don’t need someone from MOMA or the Dusseldorf School to come here to tell me what is good and what is bad. What does it matter to me what they say?”

“Do you work with these vivid colors as a way of touching darkness?”

“Yes. At the same time I’m very fearful. That is: I don’t still drink beer with transvestites from Constitución until four in the morning on a Monday. If something interests me, I’ll ride by in a taxi watching from the window. I don’t drink anymore. I don’t take drugs. I have to take my child to school. There is still something of that shy provincial boy in me. That shy boy who leaves the bathroom wearing a towel so that his wife doesn’t see him naked, he is still part of who I am.”

BBQ in Mendiolaza

V

One afternoon, he spoke with an angel.

“I was visiting the Valencia Biennial in Spain. I was standing in front of a version of the Last Supper by the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. It was a black and white image of a scene done with wax dolls.”

Right there, Marcos says, the angel descended and spoke in his ear: “What are you waiting for, lad,” it said to him; it was a Spanish angel. “Head back home and have your own supper.”

Marcos got off the plane at Ezeiza airport, stopped by his house to drop off his bag, and headed in his old car for the province of Córdoba. There he bought a used board, asked a pair of photographers (former students) to help him, gathered fifteen friends and a theater producer, and organized a huge asado, a feast. The photograph — titled “Asado in Mendiolaza” — is an unclassifiable fusion of Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” and “The Drunkards” by Velasquez, infused with many liters of bad wine. He did it without great technical precision: 125-speed and f11, a couple of flashes to give the effect of supernatural light, and the air stabbed by the sun at noon.

“There was some digital retouching to fix errors that I made when I took the photo because we were all on our asses by that time.”

That photo of the asado became an icon of Argentine pop art. It was taken in October 2001, two months before the great Argentine crisis (which led to thirty-four deaths, the collapse of the currency, and the flight of the president from the roof of the Presidential Palace). Because of that, many critics said, this fellow — Marcos López — held the nation’s last asado. Some fortuitous foresight. Anticipation of a decadence that never arrived, because it never left.

“I am always invested in my work speaking from the periphery, showing the texture of under-development, the stickiness of rubber table cloths. I try to make sure my work has the pain and the untidiness of racially-mixed America. For example, I am putting up a show called ‘Vuelo de Cabotaje’ in Santa Fe that is about precisely this. I feel that we don’t have the guts for the first world, we’re on a flight between Tacna and Arequipa and the guy who checks you in is there again to help you board the plane, but he has changed into a different uniform. That emotional uncertainty is what pulls me along. It’s why I have the mermaid” — pointing to his wall. “It is a terrible knockoff of the Walt Disney mermaid, and yet she is much more beautiful.”

“Hello,” he says pretending to knock on a door. “It’s barbarity.”

“Why the fascination with mermaids?”

“Because I believe mermaids connect the South to the North. When I saw a mermaid on Hans Christian Andersen’s door in Copenhagen, when I saw it, everything became perfectly clear: ‘You have this? Okay, perfect, now I am going to show you the mermaid of the Río de la Plata.’ Then I created the underdeveloped-world version. I made a sad mermaid (I disguised a model), I put him by our river, surrounded by trash. I made it to provoke.”

“To provoke what?”

“An impact that I consider necessary. It is necessary to get the texture of life in this underdeveloped place out on the table. We are a country taught to believe in the idea of ‘progress,’ and that prevents us from connecting with our pains and our imperfections.”

“In your texts you mention a saying of your father’s, who before a sad family occasion would say, ‘Buck up.’”

“Exactly. It’s very Argentine. And very much of the immigrants. Here they made it through the pain of leaving their homes by bucking up. We were in effect raised by nostalgic grandparents who above all didn’t want us to accept their nostalgia. At least that’s what I’d say: “Why the hell am I in this godforsaken country, when I want to be playing the bagpipes in Galicia.” But there wasn’t a place to say that. Because staying silent about those feelings is part of the idea of progress. And perhaps, more than progress, when I was a boy I needed a hug. I just finished writing about this. We are going to put it in the Rosa Galisteo de Rodríguez museum in Santa Fe, which is a block from my parents’ house. They are old, and I am putting this on a giant poster.”

“That won’t be shameful?”

“No, because I also say I love them. And I am making them part of it. In fact, I am building a giant sculpture of Equeco, the Aymara god of wealth, in the museum of Santa Fe. A pop Equeco. I explained to the director of the museum that my mother and her sewing group were going to be making a hat for the Equeco. My mother must be driving the museum director crazy.”

“You speak a great deal about pain; just listening to you, you don’t come across as very sad.”

“I understand that. Someone listening to me could easily say, ‘Quit complaining, you haven’t stopped laughing the whole time we’ve been talking.’ I say to that, I have a good time, I get passionate about everything. It is like a medical regimen to exorcise the pain through humor or irony. Because, if not, I’ll end up with gastritis. And on top of that, I believe there is inside me a boy who never grew up. Intuitively, I don’t believe there is any alternative to letting loose the 51-year-old enfant terrible because that boy has to get a chance to finish growing up. It is a public health thing. A way to keep from turning into a psycho-killer or a cocaine addict.”

Marcos practices Tibetan Buddhism, does breathing meditation, and is an expert in psychodrama. Recently he has started going to “the two”, as he call his therapists. A transpersonal bioenergist who sings “Omm” and lays her hands on Marcos’ heart, and a psychiatrist who says, “She (referring to the other therapist) is your mother, and I am your father.” He has other comments too.

Marcos — the psychiatrist has said — let’s get to the point, you’re a grownup and there isn’t a lot of time. Do you know what I observe? That you are saved from falling into the worst vices and depressions because you are constantly doing your own therapy.

VI

Slight, trim, seated in a green armchair, surrounded in his colors as if these vivid exaltations were in fact his crib, Marcos says that he no longer wants to do photography: he wants to paint. He dreams about shutting himself away in Colastiné, in Santa Fe province: a place near the river where he could live, content, without the sharp taste of bile climbing in his throat. In Colastiné, he could be alone with his family, his breath, the landscape, and his watercolors.

“It may be an idle dream because I am always threatening to retire but never do. But the reality is that I am taking fewer photos. At this point, I do six a year. Or four. I am tired of cameras; I don’t even know how to use them well.”

And if he weren’t in ColastinĂ© then he’d be here, in Barracas: a Buenos Aires neighborhood of cobble-stone streets, warehouses, and old buildings that resist, if unevenly, the slaps of time and the floods. When it rains — particularly when it rains — Barracas is an unfortunate, unmasked place. But today there is sun.

Lena (his wife, a deeply nostalgic Cuban) and Aliona (her daughter) come in from the street with the dog that Marcos cannot tolerate.

“When you marry, the dog comes too, and the dog destroys your armchairs. And on top of that, once you’re married you can’t go out at four in the morning. Now I don’t go to hang out with the transvestites in Constitución. Because my wife wouldn’t like it. And because if she did like it, that would be even more worrisome.”

“And perhaps because it no longer interests you?”

“That too.”

“What does interest you?”

Marcos thinks, smiles.

“What interests me now is to have someone, up there, painting a picture of San Martin.”

On the terrace, above: a person.

A woman with long hair, stained clothes, a stool with bottles of paint in front of a dividing wall on which can be seen portraits of Bolivar, Evo Morales, and San Martin. Wanting them painted, Marcos takes on the cost of hiring someone to paint heroes on the terrace — a cost that makes Lena nervous — so that he can make photographs of them that will be used in a montage that he is putting together.

In that montage — an immense collage of images currently in the entry hall with figures like Evo, Che, Fidel, Jesus, the Lakers, two busts of Perón and Evita floating on life preservers in a canvas sink, Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima, the Bulls, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the face of Jackie O., Amalita Fortabat (one of the grande dames of Argentina), an infinity of images that do nothing more than come together in a bewildering mosaic, Babelic, and incurably of the Latin American spirit.

“I realized that to say that the world is bad or to make critical observations, as sharp or ironic as the problems themselves, wouldn’t do any good. So, gentlemen, we hand the commentary to the inner boy. Because when I experience excesses of irony I end up saying: ‘Marcos, wait a minute, let’s consider compassion, a tender glance.’ It is also an expression of desire. The mermaid
 that I brought that mermaid home with me on the airplane is an expression of what I think of life.”

Somehow, it explains the colors, the artless lines, the search for a diamond in a bag of confetti.

“For some reason,” he says, extending his arms, “for some reason, my hands are small.”

Tags: art, Buenos Aires city, culture

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