"Ballad of Solitude on Via Cavour #1", Rome, Italy, 2009. (Self-portrait in stairwell in hotel.)Being in Rome is fabulous. Staying for 3 days is a mean tease.
The quote of the Photo Festival of Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni is when Nan Goldin spoke and said,
"I hate photography." Very dead pan as if she had lost any personal affect and might possibly had been escorted to her chair in a strait jacket.
The same photography that put her on the map. The photo lovers who loved her for her disaster life and for documenting it, sat in the audience obedient and ready for the brazen stings of deep cut lashes upon their love for her. More for her known work as more a photo artist than as a multi-media artist.
Basically, she took a dump on her adoring public. Although, I did not make it to the end of her talk, I can imagine everyone applauded. We will always love the mother of "fuck you" photography? She might have well been a Nancy Spungen but without the super high IQ of 150-160.
I felt like Nan might piss on my head next...so, I left the auditorium and walked back to Via Cavour, got in my jammies and called it a night.
I spent most of my time in the hotel...and so, the following is my "Ballad of Solitude".
"Ballad of Solitude on Via Cavour #2", Rome, Italy, 2009. (Yummy colored faux velvet chairs at hotel on Via Cavour)I would be wrong to say if I didn't have the same sentiments of despising photography like Nan. Some days and some days even more.
Why have you held me in your grasp photography? Am I your slave girl? Do you leave me forever hungry for more celluloid and pixels? What kind of delusions have you told me over the last twenty years? Is there any truth to the people I photograph if the shutter speed is some fast? Or is it what I want it to be a truth between the subject and myself?
Your, Juliana...well, she did one thing that was positive. She made it through her lecture, with a construction workers tag on pinned to her breast (they did not give me a formal one with my name as there was not one made) got up with a translator and instead, just did her talk in Italian to an audience of maybe 12 members of the audience. Great publicity, right? And yes, I felt so very important.
If anything, I was reacquainted with my love for Italy, reminded of the asinine bureaucracy, and my fantasy of living in Rome was reawakened.
No, I never made it or had the time to go to the Spanish steps. Returning to Jersey City was a bummer, a reminder of the lists of work to be done. And yet, I am very thankful for the dear friends around me--they really do stand behind me.
