About Spaces...
About Spaces...
It's not really "exotic"...that's not the idea
Christian Lombardi / Photographer / Bolivia
Spotlights On:
2023-24 -Pole Dance
The twelfth arcane and the sirens.
The last time I asked a friend who is well-connected in the editorial media and both national and external funding circles to help me publish this topic, he simply said: 'The photos are good because you’re good, but the topic is irrelevant¨. After spending 30 years in the press, I shouldn’t have been surprised by this kind of editorial disregard, with which I had already encountered so many times, But, now that I’m over 50 and professionally out of the market and its rules, which are far from the ideals I inherited from 1960s photojournalism, all that’s left for me is to stay true to my primary instinct with photography: to share signs with others and see if something happens.
In the end, I find myself staggering between on one side the merchants who hold truths that are beneficial to humanity and their soothing propaganda machine and on the other side, other disheveled "artists" inspired, according to them, by the same divine destiny, or something like that, masturbating themselves over a supposed egocentric genius. At this point, obviously, I can only continue harvesting and sharing images, with great joy, of whatever I want, laughing at this whole pathetic media circus, happily accompanied by the devil himself...
Here they are, in 20 random pics of some more of 300 selected: The navigators of the absolute axis.
2020-23 -Mixed Martial Arts
Cerberus observes on one side the Nietzschean will to power, on the other the day-to-day will to control, and finally, with the third head: the tension between the two...
Of those who pass nearby, he will decide who enters, who exits, who to say yes but meaning no...
He plays for both sides, with mutual consent, and simply enjoys that.
Its nature designates him on one side, but it’s not incompatible with the other, quite the opposite.
He crushes, spits, barks, ignores, runs, or floats around. He’s just another filter between planes and worlds.
He is one of the Medusa’s beloved, and here is one of his reports...
97-2001-Narcotics-Embedded side
Called now "Dark Times" /1997-2001: Embedded during
four years with Bolivian Jungle Narcotic Special Forces
Being integrated into the troops, embedded, is a very recent form of recovery by war correspondents.
It can go back to 499-449 BC, during the wars between Greece and Persia, with Herodotus, historian present on "the ground", becoming one of the fathers of journalism, and in this case journalism in conflict situations armed.
In the 21st century, in 2003, 775 reporters and photographers were brought in by the US Army as integrants, during the invasion of Iraq...and so on...
2020-Plastic is fantastic
Covid-Plasticized souls and liquified brains
2003-Police vs Military and vice versa
Shooting between Police Forces and Military /February 12, 2003 - After the mutiny of several police regiments in front of a "gasoline" imposed by the government and an altercation between police and military troops in the plaza of the Government Palace of La Paz, two days of chaos broke out, casualties and wounded among the military, police and civilians. On February 12, troops from the presidential regiment and police troops were shot, using machine guns, snipers, attacks and counter-attacks, unleashing a mini civil war spread a few blocks around the government palace. The then President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada knew then his first serious internal problem, precursor of the confrontations of the following year (2003) that ended in his abandonment of the country.
2016-Pain without gain
2019-Coup d'État...or not?...
During the end of October and the all month of November 2019, the polarized country, divided between Evo Morales supporters and the rest of the population, with opposition supporters heading the movement, get to the streets.
About Oblivion
May 2016 - La Paz, Bolivia - From oblivion to ashes: Forgotten dead bodies reduction in La Paz cementery. What can you be as forgoten bones and ashes?
2020-Miners:Screwed as ever
Public Eye Report - Switzerland
The forgotten ones of the Porco mine
Timo Kollbrunner, Public Eye
Novembre 2020 - Christian Lombardi
2004-Cholitas wrestling - The Origins
2004-2005 When Cholitas Wrestling just started in Bolivia: Firstly invented to help old classical wrestling shows, with no money, no press, no strangers. Cholitas wrestling begins his ascension with some two or three women putting everything in the spectacles, for their little public, mostly low class people and their childrens...Then, everything changed...got lost...
Made in XIX th century: the energy grail
About nonsense and spaces
"Urbanism — “city planning” — is capitalism’s method for taking over the natural and
human environment. Following its logical development toward total domination, capitalism now
can and must refashion the totality of space into
its own particular decor.
...
While all the technical forces of capitalism contribute toward various forms of separation,
urbanism provides the material foundation for those forces and prepares the ground for their
deployment. It is the very
technology of separation."
Guy Debord / Society of the Spectacle - 1967
Home, sweet home
2015-Out and Back
Eric Valdes's daughter slippers...so lost and sad rabbits...
05.00: He's gone, we stay.
A cuate goes so I came back..so simple, doesn't it?
We all loose friends, relatives, al life long. Sometimes we “understand” why, sometimes we don’t. I left photography some years ago, disgusted by Press, lack of empathy of the public, feed purposely by “the system” , so we just don’t have any visible reason to react in front of the “world out there”, neither our inside worlds...our own stories.
So I had a good friend too, then, one day, he just starts to die...I could say.
During about one year, I saw him trapped in the all cancer degeneration context, talking about suicide or travels, adventure or darkness.
Cancer mixed with hepatitis, bad and wrong diagnostics, false sold hopes, medics, natural things, even witches, doctors, examinations, all “the stuff”...until the end.
And so in a morning he asks me to take pictures of his “last moments”, to get back to photography covering him. I remember to smile and told him: “all right, you’re going to suffer because I use invasive wide angle, aggressive technics...I’m going to play with your face...” keeping in mind that I would be so idiot that he would have to fight more and more to get me out of his life, get healthy back again and send me to hell...
That’s the way I move, the way I have learnt : hurt me and I will react, get violent, and fight...that’s the way which saves me until now. I thought it was a kind of universal “first-aid-kit”, useful for anybody...And yes, I was wrong. Two days after he asks me to get my camera working back, he dies. So, at 05.00, I took the last shot on an old passed black and white roll. I felt hungry, because he didn’t react as I thought: he just surrender, he changed “the game” rules and territory: he gets to play “in another place”.
I get frustrated too, to see a so unoffensive guy walking away, leaving “us” in our trashy world. I can not blame him...But at the end, I get back to photography thanks to him...with a great renewed gift as a great renewed curse.