Asian RoadsHéctor Méndez Caratini

Text by Max Kozloof

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The Ethereal Blue Horizon

Héctor Méndez Caratini in Conversation with Max Kozloff

(The following interview took place over theInternet from February to April 2013)

Héctor Méndez Caratini is one of Latin America’s masters of contemporary photography. Asian Roads is the name of his latest epic project. It is a compilation of three exhibits into one. These are: The Buddha Series, 2010, Visions of Ancient Angkor, 2011, and Himalayan Kingdoms, 2012. It relates to the passage of time as observed in the ancient cultures of Asia.

Max Kozloff: Engaging with your vast repertoire of themes and styles, a viewer might well ask what is this medium called photography. With you, it appears to serve many differing functions in short order: a form of national remembrance, an archaeological guide, a scientific technique, a rhapsody on the subject of cultic mysteries. Even to students of photography and its many byways, your multi-track practices are startling. How is the camera hospitable to your concerns that require—or suggest—treatments often at odds with each other? Héctor Méndez Caratini: I have chosen the medium of photography, and video, to communicate my thoughts. I have many diverse interests, including many that touch on academic subjects: archaeology, anthropology, sociology, political science, history, medicine, botany, and nature—and then there is, as you note, a global religious spiritual search. For the past forty years I have been an ophthalmic photographer. The scientific technique in that particular profession has taught me a lot in life. I have trained myself to be patient, in order to observe closely. I have learned to detect and document pathological changes that occur over time in our retinas [Fig. 1]. For example, I have taken part in several national clinical trials where I photographed the same patient’s eyes over a period of ten years. Those same principles, I have applied to my personal photo projects. I have been documenting the contemporary history of Puerto Rico for the same amount of time. My photographs include elements of national—you might even say patriotic—and cultural heritage, such as the colorful masks and traditional costumes found in three coastal towns Mascarada (Masquerade, 1984) [Fig. 2], petroglyphs carved by the first inhabitants of the island Petroglifos de Boriquén (Petroglyphs of Puerto Rico, 1975-1985), political prisoners, sugarcane [Fig. 3], and coffee plantations Haciendas Cafetaleras de Puerto Rico (Coffee Plantations of Puerto Rico, 1987-1990) and other aspects of cultural identity.

Fig. 2 Masquerade, Hatillo, Puerto Rico, 1983

Fig. 1Arterial macroaneurysm with subretinal hemorrhage, 2011

Opposite:On the way to Asia, at 38,000 feet over the Arctic Ocean, 2008

Cover:Apsara 1, (Detail), 2010

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Raices Ancestrales (Ancestral Roots, 1979-1995) is another of my ambitious projects, in which I have documented lesser-known religions in the Caribbean and Latin America. Among these are Searching for Miracles (1979-1988), black-and-white photographs of religious festivities (mainly Catholic) in Puerto Rico [Fig. 4]; color photographs (and videos) of Gagá and Voodoo (1990-1993) [Fig. 5], in the Dominican Republic; María Lionza (1992) [Fig. 6], in Venezuela; and the Orixás (1994-1995) [Fig. 7], in Brazil. While working in foreign countries, it has not been easy to gain the trust of “others” so that I can photograph them in their respective environments. Portraiture requires a kind of seduction, in which I have to enamor the subject beforehand and convince him or her to have the picture taken. There have been times when the subjects were not receptive or hospitable, and would not allow their portraits to be taken. Sometimes they would tell me to come back next week, after they had consulted the gods to see if they approved. I always respect their privacy. My present work is a continuation of the same search, but on the other side of the world—in Asia. For the past two years I have been documenting ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples in Cambodia and long-lasting Buddhist monasteries in the Himalayas.

MK: Speaking of Asia, its traditions, rituals, memories, and textures, not to mention its colors and faces—all these are allotted a major place in your professional output. When you refer to your adventures or misadventures in Nepal or Cambodia, you speak as if the gods, the local gods were responsible for them. (Although clearly the authorities were the real actors.) I was struck by the way you characterized your motive, your human motive, not solely your photographic objective. Is it possible that you want to share in the spiritual bliss vaunted by yellow-robed practitioners? I speak as one unpersuaded by any clergy, no matter how hallowed. You regard religious doctrines, no matter how parochial, as participant in universal patterns of belief. I wonder if this isn’t a kind of nostalgia on your part, the token of a desire to participate in the experience of subjects far removed from you in background. Or is this too presumptuous a question?

HMC: I always read many academic books ahead of time on the subject matter that I am interested in photographing. I immerse myself in the subject to get a taste of it. Whether it would be in Asia or anywhere else on the planet for that matter, I always go “inside” these remote rituals with a local guide I feel I can trust, one who knows the terrain, the local customs, and the language of the people I am trying to photograph. But even then, sometimes the local guides fail me and I am left all alone by myself to improvise with Plan B.

Fig. 4Devotee of the Virgin ofMonserrat, Hormigueros,Puerto Rico, 1978

Fig. 5Woman in a trance, possessed by the spirits, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1992

Fig. 6The priestess Juana de Dios performing a midnight fire cleansing ritual, Sorte, Venezuela, 1991

Fig. 3Central Aguirre, Guayama, Puerto Rico, 1984

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Fig. 7Omolú dressed in “palha da costa”, Cachoeira, Brazil, 1995

Fig. 8H. Méndez Caratini participating in a healing ritual, Sorte, Venezuela, 1991

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If the locals allow me “in” and it is possible, I always try to participate in the rituals I am photographing [Fig. 8]. That way, I get a closer perspective, from the inside, on what it’s all about, so as to get to know and understand their cultures better. Even then, sometimes it becomes very difficult for me to enter that magical, secretive world of the “other.” In Tibet I had to pay a hefty fee to be allowed to photograph, for a very limited time period, “the yellow-robed practitioners” (as you call them) inside Ta Shi Lhun Po Monastery, in Shigatse. The hypnotic chanting monks, in the interior of this very dark, damp monastery, were reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s majestic chiaroscuro film scenarios in Apocalypse Now. On a photography expedition in the northern region of Cambodia, when I reached the summit of Kbal Spean, a sacred mountain, the sky suddenly turned black, the clouds were filled with lightning, and I was caught in a torrential downpour. It was as if Lord Shiva had requested an immediate sacrifice from this humble human being. In the Hindu trinity, Shiva is known as the Destroyer. At the revered site, my Leica camera died after having gotten wet from the rain storm. Luckily, my ever-trusty Nikon survived the onslaught and I was able to continue photographing the carved lingas (the phallus, representations of the male sexual organ, the creative power of the universe) by the Ruisey River [Pages 62-63]. Lingas are the iconic representations of this fearsome god. I sought refuge inside a small dark cave that had a rustic animistic altar to the ancestral deities [Fig. 9]. Out of it there poured, in all directions, bats, snakes, frogs, lizards, you name it! On the way down, we were accompanied by flocks of colorful butterflies lighting our way. There were thousands of unexploded land mines there, just off the beaten tracks. In Venezuela, at first I was not allowed inside the jungles at the venerated mountain of Sorte. The military controlled the access. Fortunately, my guide, a well-known local anthropologist, who was very resourceful, managed to convince them to allow us in (after paying what they call la mordida—“the bite,” a “fee” to get in). I circled the area and approached the subjects that interested me, the mediums, when they were coherent and asked for their permission to photograph them (without flash) while they were possessed by the spirits, which happened around midnight [Fig. 10]. On another trip overseas, to Brazil, while photographing the orishas (the black African deities), I wanted to document a particular altar located inside one of the terreiros (temples of the Afro-Brazilian religion) in San Salvador de Bahia. The local priest told me that I would have to wait a few more days, while he contacted the deities to ask for their permission. By the time they would answer, I would be at an altitude of 34,000 feet on a flight back home. But through my perseverance, I was able to enter another terreiro and document their candomblé rituals [Fig. 11]. In the Caribbean, on the French island of Martinique, I documented the impressive rituals carried out in honor of Kalimaï, a bloodthirsty Hindu

Fig. 9H. Méndez Caratini and Lap Tek, taking refuge inside a cave with an animistic altar, Kbal Spean, Cambodia, 2010

Fig. 10A shaman enacts The Viking in a blood cleansing ritual, Sorte, Venezuela, 1991

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Fig. 11Candomblé in honor of Obá, King of Ketu (Benin), Salvador Bahia, Brazil, 1994

Fig. 12Decapitation of a goat in honor of Kalimaï, Macouba, Martinique, 1998

Fig. 13The colored scarves of the loas and guedes, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1992

Fig. 14The cachuas striking the tombs of their ancestors, with the whips, Cabral, Dominican Republic, 1994

deity. While watching the decapitation of goats [Fig. 12], and chickens I felt as though I was next in line to be sacrificed. My friend, a local university professor, was with me all the time, protecting me. He told me that in the good old days children were sacrificed.

Once, on a centuries-old old sugar-cane plantation, while I was photographing Haitian voodoo ceremonies, I slept on the houngan’s (priest) bed. When I woke up, I was all covered up by the colored scarves of the loas and guedes [Fig. 13]. Apparently, they had performed a ritual on me without my knowledge. Also, while documenting in Hispaniola on another trip, I wanted to document a particular ceremony that takes place at sunset inside a small poor local cemetery. I drove more than a thousand kilometers in a rented car all along the frontier with Haiti searching for my local guide, but I never found him. That afternoon, a tall skinny muscular black man I encountered on the street told me, “If you take my photograph, I will kill you.” In the end, with the help of the local doctor as my substitute guide, I managed to take the iconic photograph at the ceremony with the cachuas striking the tombs of their ancestors with their whips so the spirits would rise and grant them favors [Fig. 14]. The main personage in the photograph, the red-costumed man, turned out to be the one that had threatened me the previous day. That night I could not sleep. It seemed as if the spirits had followed me to the hotel. They pulled hard on my legs and I almost fell off the bed. Photographing the gods is not an easy task. In a way, it is a magical relationship. A mixture of spirits, deities, and gods, along with humans, in the decision-making process of who lets you “in” or not. I humanize the gods. Whether they be real persons or deities. Everywhere you go, you have to pay an “admission fee” to get in. In the end, it’s all the same. Whether they are Buddhist, Hindu, Voodoo, or Catholic ceremonies. It is mankind’s universal search for divine intervention (from their local deities), to grant them favors and heal them and solve their problems. Everybody, no matter where they live, has the same human needs. Love, health, and economic issues that need to be resolved.

MK: So many of the campaigns you listed implied a rather selfless approach to subject matter that needed to be objectively described. If the aim was to be recuperative, and richly detailed in its account of ceremonies and symbols, well, that is certainly an honorable tradition in photography. Mostly, you are looking back on subjects, like the old and now abandoned coffee plantations of Puerto Rico. They do not lack a resonance of pride and melancholy, though still, they are rendered in a detached spirit. But what a jump from those black and whites to your almost inflammatory, super-heated treatment of artificial color in The Buddha Series! There, you are anything but an impersonal observer. Suddenly an idiosyncratic sensibility announces itself. What came over you?

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Fig. 15.Hacienda María, Yauco, Puerto Rico, 1989

Fig. 16Xibalba, 1987

Fig. 17Petroglyph, Utuado, Puerto Rico, 1975

HMC: Since I was a small child growing up, I have known of the existence of the coffee plantations. My maternal grandfather had one and I would accompany him to the farm on the weekends. My documentation of three-dozen of them became a tribute to him; as well as, to the Corsican immigrants who cultivated and processed the coffee in Puerto Rico. (My second last name, Caratini, from my mother’s family, is Corsican.) Curiously enough, that particular photo exhibit, Haciendas Cafetaleras de Puerto Rico (Coffee Plantations of Puerto Rico) [Fig. 15], became one of my best-known series, mainly because the public instantly identified themselves with the photographs and felt proud of their forebears. On the other hand, the B&W sepia-colored photographs in Visions of Ancient Angkor (2011), which documents the architecture of forty different centuries old Hindu and Buddhist temples in the jungles of Cambodia, are a direct consequence of that particular documentary style of photography. That project is architectural in nature, and its main interest, besides the anthropological view, is the preservation of the image—the memory—so that others can appreciate and feel proud of their historical past. After I completed the photographs for the exhibit and book Visions of Ancient Angkor, I realized that I was missing a key element, the human element—the Buddhist monks inside these iconic monuments, at prayer in their monasteries. A year later I visited Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. Thus came to fruition my personal photo essay on the Himalayan Kingdoms (2012). The treatment of the Buddha images in The Buddha Series (2010) is a further story. This is not straight photography. With the advent of Photoshop software, I felt like I had to reinvent the photography of the 21st century. This is another kind of portraiture—in this particular case, portraits of Buddha, a religious icon. As you said, the colors are very hot, electric, radiant, and that’s intentional. This series is evocative of my early use of computers in Xibalba (created at the Boston Film and Video Foundation, in 1987) [Fig. 16], in which I transformed the B&W photographs of the aboriginal petroglyphs [Fig. 17]. It is as if the images are reminiscent of the psychedelic period of the 60’s. This particular series is a logical extension of the Pachamama movement in my previous exhibit titled Inkaterra: A Suite in Three Movements (2009). It is similar to my treatment of the image of Wacon [Fig. 18], an Inca deity. Over the years I have photographed numerous details of weather-beaten and time-worn walls throughout the world, which in this recent project I incorporate as backgrounds to the cutout images of the Buddha. The fiery colors are the colors of the sunsets, as often seen in the tropics. They are incandescent colors bordering on the limits of abstraction. In a way, it is a series in homage to the graphic arts movement in Puerto Rico, to the silk-screen tradition of creating posters. Even though these painterly images are neither posters nor silk screens, they have been printed as large-scale images on canvas or 100% cotton rag paper. So, these

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Fig. 18Wacon, Lima, Peru, 2008

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subjects, icons, or ancestral symbols have been evolving over time, over my entire career. MK: Your reference to Photoshop and the “need to reinvent the photography of the 21st century” marks you as a progressive, at least in use of technology. The combination of up-to-date software and ancient subject matter is striking. But it involves more than a stylistic tendency, not much present at the beginning of your career. For the colors in the Buddha images are often not those of the objects depicted, but of the pictures themselves. It is evocative, not documentary, chroma, and therefore calls attention to your painterly choice of embodiment. This is a conceptual departure from the reportorial mode. I think it is interesting that you can associate your fanciful technique with other media, such as Puerto Rican graphic arts. In other words, you invite us to reflect on cultural ways of seeing, not just the flat representation of the things seen. When I converse with other Latin American photographers, I notice that they too accentuate a certain communal responsibility to their viewers of the same background. That seems to come more naturally to them than any statement about their self-consciousness as artists. But you are definitely an artist, with a vision that can be private and personal. To what degree or on what level can I attribute meanings in your work to the agency of that vision?

HMC: As background information, when I was growing up in Puerto Rico, silkscreens, woodcuts, and lithographs were the medium of preference in the graphic arts. The silkscreen tradition in Puerto Rico spans a period of over six decades. The images are flat and the primary colors are very bright. In a way, as I said earlier, the images from The Buddha Series are suggestive of that medium. Today very few artists practice it. Yet that particular look is the effect I wanted to achieve while using a large scale Epson professional printer. The altered backgrounds in this series are similar to the colors of the images created by 21st century mapmaking technology, such as infrared satellite imagery, sonar maps, and Optical Coherence Tomography of the retina [Fig. 19]. During that period of time, which lasted a couple of decades, as a means of promoting the graphic arts the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture officially sponsored the Biennial of Latin American Printmaking. So even though I did not practice that medium, this particular “cultural way of seeing” has been a part of me since the beginning of my career and has influenced my work in a painterly way. Many of the themes of the artworks in the biennial were nationalistic in nature. Another key factor in the development of this new work was the Puerto Rican santo. Santos are the carved wooden images of Catholic saints that are an important part of the island’s art-craft movement. It is a centuries-old

Fig. 19Macular Edema, OCT, 2013

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Fig. 2019th-century wooden santo of the Virgin of Monserrat, Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, 1992

tradition in Puerto Rican art. In a way, my portraits of the Buddhas might be seen as a logical extension of my previous series of photographs of 19th century santos [Fig. 20].

Now, with the advent of the Internet and digital technology I have become a citizen of the world. With the arrival of digitization anything is possible. Your mind is the only limit to the powers of creation. My new work finds room for innovation, yet it is still committed to photography as the primary medium. As you are well aware, the late 1970’s through the mid 1980’s saw the phenomenon of the Latin American Colloquium on Photography. We both had a major role in the persuasive second colloquium, held in Mexico City in 1981, where over a hundred Latin American photographers exhibited their work. (We were both on the Selection Committee and you were one of the main speakers at the symposium, with a lecture on subjectivity, photography, and its multiple interpretations.) Their photographs frequently documented manifestations of the culture and cultural heritage of their respective nations. The pictures exemplified national identity and personality in forms of communal life, customs, religious festivities, and humor; as well as, the people’s struggle for equal rights, liberty, and independence. Fraternal sentiments, family values, and social problems within their own communities were also themes often addressed in the colloquium. I have been influenced by all these historical events, which have helped shape and define my own artistic vision. I have tried to evolve my art into one of a larger global scope, in which the same issues are addressed, but at an international level. Themes that have their origins in the intimate, local subject-matter of previously photographed projects. Nowadays, my personal vision addresses themes related to Buddhism, instead of Catholicism. I am trying to explore themes that transcend the local shores or borders of my nation and explore mankind’s search for the absolute spiritual truth.

MK: Since you mention the time we both attended the Second Latin American Colloquium on Photography in Mexico City in 1981 [Fig. 21], you jogged my memory of that earlier period. Our hosts asked me to expound some synthesis on the state of the art in over twenty countries, an impossible job. It came home to me that the affairs pictured were in an unhappy condition that sociality was tense, income was low, politics were oppressive, and the future might be sinister. I caught the sense of a dire turn of events, and the makings of a crisis in cultures that had little experience of democratic practice. A viewer could interpret a tragic atmosphere on the basis of the dramatic light and dark schemes of the pictures themselves. I read many of those images as implicit criticism of oppressive regimes, an accent missing in my perspective on photography in the North. Your work strikes me as affirmative in its themes, in its solicitude towards icons, monuments, traditions, above all in its respectful

Fig. 21Second Latin American Colloquiumon Photography, Mexico,1981

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Fig. 22Manuel Álvarez Bravo Stricking worker murdered, 1934

mode of address. It’s concerned with the memory track of national consciousness, to be sure in parallel with the work of many of your Latin American colleagues, but without their critical attitude toward the present. You treat faces as permanent in their typology as the display of cultural artifacts, which you show with loving attention. In Mexico, the founding father of photography was Manuel Álvarez Bravo; in Puerto Rico, it seems that Jack Delano was especially influential. Here is a figure from the American Farm Security Administration (FSA). Would you count him and that whole campaign from which he stemmed as among your sources, even as you moved on to Asia?

HMC: Certainly, as you say, Álvarez Bravo was among the major influential figures in Latin America. His seminal images of La buena fama durmiendo (Good reputation sleeping, 1938), and Obrero en huelga asesinado (Striking worker murdered, 1934) [Fig. 22],for example, are major icons in the history of Mexican photography. I was very much impressed when I first met him, in 1978, at the First Latin American Colloquium on Photography, held in Mexico City. On the other hand, Jack Delano was the last photographer to join the Farm Security Administration. His work drew inspiration from Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and the other eight FSA photographers. By coincidence, Ben Shahn was a second cousin of Delano’s wife Irene. Delano joined the FSA in May 1940. A year later, in November, he was sent to photograph FSA clients in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. In 1943, the FSA was eliminated and Delano was drafted by the Army and assigned to the new Army Air Force. After his release from the military in 1946, he moved to Puerto Rico. While living on the island, Delano worked on other projects not related at all to documentary photography, such as making films for a government agency, writing classical music, and becoming assistant program director for WIPR-TV, the government television station. Our paths crossed in the late seventies. I had studied photography at the Germain School of Photography, in New York, in 1973. A year later, I returned home and started my professional career documenting local subject matter. After I had amassed a significant body of work I contacted Jack. Very few people knew at the time that he was living in Puerto Rico. Irene was a graphics designer. She produced my first catalogue for my one-man show at the Museum of Art in Ponce, in 1978. While I was showing Jack and Irene photographs from my early documentations in Puerto Rico, my images impressed them so much that it motivated him to return to the medium of photography. In 1978 he wrote a proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which was approved in 1979, to work on Contrasts: 40 Years of Change and Continuity in Puerto Rico. In my darkroom I printed most of the photographs for that exhibition, which was held at the Museum of the University of Puerto Rico in 1982.

Fig. 23Jack Delano,Photographic Memories,1997

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Fig. 25Political prisoner Andrés Figueroa Cordero, Aguada, Puerto Rico, 1979

As he clearly implies in his biography, Photographic Memories (for which I took the book’s cover photograph) [Fig. 23], he credits my photographs for inspiring him to come back to the medium: “Wasn’t it about time, after forty years, to go back into the field and show the Puerto Rico of the present as compared with my early FSA photographs? I wouldn’t need some young photographer to show the Puerto Rico of today.” After Irene died and his children had moved to the states, I became like an adoptive son to Jack. Our relationship continued to grow. I would invite him over to my home to celebrate Christmas, Father’s Day, his birthday, and other special occasions. Also, I looked after him during his last years. Later on he acknowledges in his memoirs: “I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had such friends as… Héctor Méndez Caratini.” So it was a reciprocal relationship. Another significant photographer in the development of my career was W. Eugene Smith [Fig. 24], whom I personally met during his 1977 visit to Puerto Rico. After he had finished his epic photo-essay on Minamata, Japan, in 1971-1973, Gene came to inform us of the dangers of mercury poisoning. During that period, a giant U.S. pharmaceutical company was poisoning one of our tributary rivers, which discharged its waters into the main water reservoir, which in turn served the major metropolitan area of San Juan. Smith’s pioneering photo-essays were important in my photographic work: Los sueños del patriota (The Patriot’s Dreams, 1981) [Fig. 25], my project on the Puerto Rican political prisoners who had been incarcerated for over 25 years in U.S. prisons, and Vieques: crónicas del calvario (Vieques: Chronicles of a Hell on Earth, 2000) [Fig. 26], which documented 60 years of bombing and the contamination of the population by the U.S. Navy on a small off-shore island to the east of Puerto Rico. The work of Evans, the FSA photographers, and Smith’s socially and environmentally committed photography influenced my early formative period. Subsequently, I have moved on and my work has evolved into a more personal style, as visualized in my recent Inkaterra: a suite in three movements (2009) and my Asian Period (2010-2012).

Max Kozloff was art critic for The Nation in the 1960s and Executive Editor of Artforum, 1975-77. Since then, he continues to write on photography and practice photography. He has published three collections of his essays on the medium, and more recently The Theatre of the Face Portrait Photography Since 1900. In the Fall of 2013, he had a retrospective exhibition at the Art Institute Chicago and a one-man show, titled New York Over The Top, at the Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.

Fig. 24W. Eugene SmithJuncos, Puerto Rico, 1977

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Fig. 26Viacrucis III, Vieques , 2000Mix media on canvas4 X 3 feet (10.16 X7.62 cm)