Pedro Meyer
[Photographer, b. 1935, Madrid, Spain, lives in Mexico City.]
Before, the myth of “photography doesn’t lie” was used in order to cover up tricks. If I [make a] portrait [of] you, accommodate you, illuminate you, put make up on you or use a filter, am I not manipulating reality? The only difference is that now I can do it from the computer in the postclick instead of the preclick. If I decide to photograph something instead of something else, I also manipulate reality. Of course a photograph can lie or commit abuse, but it always could.
I am of course not questioning the validity of patience that some great photographers have exerted in order to get at exactly the image that they imagined, but even when patience was at the core of such endeavors an element of chance would inevitably crop up here and there. I personally dislike the notion that my work would be determined mainly by luck.
Ever since I was a child I was interested in those dusk particles that seemed to go up surrounding the path marked by the light. My bedroom was converted into a scene for similar light shows when the rays were filtered through the Venetian blinds. I imagined that I was very small and that I would climb up on one of those particles in movement, and that I would travel to a different world.
The experience in a traditional photographic representation has been limited—although in truth the camera sees more than we do, and therefore is not limited at all—to those elements that the lens was able to capture. To the silver halide or dyes, I can now add my own memory.
My images are the trace of my perceptions and my history.
I had no intention of waiting a week, ten days or the time necessary so that something would happen, so that I could get the “decisive moment” looked for so often by photographers... The specific “decisive moment” wasn’t to be found, it had to be created.
I no longer have to stand for twelve hours at a time inevitably exposed to all those chemicals in the darkroom. As I grow older and my vision increasingly fails me, I can still make up with experience what I lack in agility out in the field. When geometry and content miss their original appointment, I can try to make up for such a lost encounter. I can, like a gold miner, go back to all my old archives and find countless new veins and find new uses for my previous work.
The notion of the real and the fake has come full circle. We now tend to dismiss the real because it looks like a fake. The “truth” is that in their own way, when all is said and done, all fakes and surrogates also become their own sort of original.
