The Entomologist

People walked everywhere, moving through this thing called life. The city had an air of energy about it with all the coming and going.

People walked to the mercado next the Plaza de Flowers where stalls of color beguiled walkers hauling their provisions in rolling shopping carts. Women used wheel chairs to haul bags of groceries and cement in their utilitarian universe. Their rolling world carried a lot of stuff where the rubber met the road.

This indicated an invalid family member waited at home in a rocking chair watching Spanish game shows and talking heads. Waiting for the goods.

As an entomologist, a hunter-gatherer with Metis, a cunning intelligence, seeking visual epiphanies, Mr. Point opened his aperture to f/1.4 and let in the Light. All of it. Blinding light, prisms of kaleidoscopes, muted spectrums in waves and particles guiding his efforts to manipulate a tool, a well designed black foreign range finder. A camera obscura.

It had the finesse of a magnifying glass, a Hubble telescope looking into an expanding infinite universe, illuminating distant black holes sucking matter into a void. He couldn’t see the black holes but he knew they were there.

It was one thing he carried. He started carrying it in Nam and he was not about to stop now. It was just a tool. It allowed him to stop time and divide it two. The Kairos of his eye allowed him to discriminate intuitively. Both an eye and a mirror.

He filled it up, refining his being, becoming one with the subject, how to smile, how silence worked, how to be a detached observer, a photo journalist. How to disappear inside the scene, move with the quickness of a wild animal, how to see, really see, visualize, anticipate the impending decisive moment while stalking his prey with cunning.

How to freeze, compose in the viewfinder, breath, squeeze, advance with a quick flick of the opposable thumb, load, unload, develop, fix, print, label, and assemble his work. Film was his prayer wheel.

He adjusted to exile, making fundamental survival adaptations with proportion and harmony. He took his time quickly.

He hunted down images in the Sunday flea market; old photos, stamps, phonographs, typewriters, dolls, tools, locks, and religious paintings of the Last and Final Supper. He composed seafood, books, discarded clothing, toys, glass, buttons, broken phones, paintbrushes, watches, faces, hands, and lottery tickets.

Slot machine games with revolving wheels of fortune and flashing lights filled bars as drinking men pumped 100 peseta coins into hungry machines. Unemployed men and women prowled streets, corners, shops and exchanges selling lottery tickets called ONCE.

The Champion grocery store across from the old market sold sixteen different lottery tickets. A city this old and focused on religious faith had a fix on gambling. Pay now and pray later. People this poor needed all the hope money could buy. Small money.

He imagined streets, parks, cathedrals, beaches, white haired ladies playing bingo in the sand, women, and children dressed for religious festivals, men cutting fish, hands holding creased maps or thick Cuban cigars, and tourists gripping each other in wild lost abandoned desperation.

He captured lovers in the sun, men hammering old stones, pigeons fighting over scraps of bread, the moon between television aerials, juxtapositions of hammers and crucifixes on old fabric, balconies, brown nuns supporting their habit, blue Moorish doors, and the historical remains before and after Chris sailed east. He shot day and night, returning to the room to download a day’s images and write up notes.