It was an autumn evening, one of those evenings that bring rain.
In my studio apartment in Buenos Aires, under the one large window that framed the rooftops of San Telmo, arranging notes on my Moleskine, I was sketching a photograph that I did not make until a year later, in northern Iraq.
Many times it is tempting to believe that a photograph can be born by chance, sometimes thanks to a kind of luck. And this belief comes out much stronger when it comes to reportage, when it comes to telling a story where you are not always sure what can happen.
Attention is sky-high, eyes are clicking in a continuous motion. There is that will to capture every detail, every breath. But for a photographer, the reality is quite different.
During a pleasant meeting with Ryuichi Watanabe of NewOldCamera, a few years ago in Milan, I stated that I was not in the habit of carrying my camera with me at all times, unless I was out on some job (I know, it may sound strange for a photographer).
But this unhealthy habit of mine has never prevented me from taking photographs. I simply do it by other means, and one of these is, without a doubt, writing: sketches in the notebook or on napkins at the bar; the smartphone, or whatever other tool is available at the moment.
I have always demanded for myself, almost as if it were a moral duty, a heartfelt approach to the stories I was going to tell, a going in feet first, an obligation to get dirty (a concept very dear to me) even if this has not exempted me, over time, from producing work of dubious quality. But, as with life in general, it happens that you stumble while knowing how to walk or that you don’t find the right word while knowing how to speak.
Simply … to make mistakes.
That fall evening in Buenos Aires, in my small studio apartment in San Telmo, I was working on notes for a story about loneliness, violence, prevarication, alienation.
And as often happens in these moments, where a work, a reportage, a project, is breathed in long before I take the camera in hand, I made a sketch of what my head was envisioning, of how I wanted to tell part of that story I was beginning to know. Then I closed the notebook, and a mate ended the evening.
In Buenos Aires that fall, I never made that shot.
A year later in Erbil, in northern Iraq, the photograph that wanted to talk about loneliness, violence, prevarication, alienation, found its own light. And its own breath.
