What the hell are you supposed to say about photographing Guillermo Gomez-Peña that doesn’t immediately become part of the problem? The minute you start explaining, contextualizing, footnoting the fucking thing, you’re doing exactly what his work exists to detonate, the impulse to contain, to translate, to make the raw and impossible thing safe for academic consumption.
So here’s Gomez-Peña in full regalia, whatever hybrid mytho-techno-shamanic thing he’s assembled to ask questions bodies aren’t supposed to ask in polite company. You can almost smell the tension in the room through the images: half the audience is there because they genuinely get it, the other half is there because they’re supposed to get it, and everyone’s taking notes like notes mean anything when confronted with a human being who’s made themselves into a walking wound, a living provocation.
And I’m in the wings. I’m behind the camera. Performance photography, I call it. Which is a nice way of saying I’m the official witness to something that refuses to be officially witnessed. Every click of that shutter is a tiny act of violence and preservation happening simultaneously. I’m freezing him, framing him, turning the live uncontainable moment into something that can be published in a journal.
So I was there in that room with all those people who study performance like it’s something separate from life, and I pointed a machine at a man who’s spent his whole career insisting that the separation is the lie. And now these pixels are all that’s left of whatever unrepeatable thing went down that day.
