Mariachi

This is an image in my portfolio.

Los Angeles, like many of its inhabitants, tries its best to pretend that it is a spry young thing devoid of history, traditions and wrinkles. From time to time, however, the facade cracks and you get a glimpse of a more storied interior.

Cinco De Mayo, a regional holiday in Mexico, has taken on much more significance in the United States than in Mexico itself (cf. St Patrick's Day). For Mexican immigrants there are festivals and fiestas; for non-Mexicans it's an excuse to drink Coronas and reminisce about those drunken spring breaks in Cancun. As you can guess from its name, it takes place annually on the 5th of May.

Several years ago while I was still living there I went down to Olvera Street in Los Angeles. I made a beeline for the music stage featuring traditional mariachi bands. Many of them came from local high schools, the level of musicianship very high. I was surprised, but this says more about my daily exposure to Mexican culture (or lack thereof) and prejudices than anything else.

I took up a position in the alleyway backstage where the musicians gathered, practiced, joked and kept out of the sun. I was struck by this girl, by her looks, outfit, and poise. I was determined to take a photograph of her separate from her fellow mariachis. In an unguarded moment I snapped her as she looked over at me. Nowadays I would have simply approached her and asked her permission, but either out of shyness, feeling out of place, or simply a desire to stay anonymous and record what I was seeing without interfering, I held back.

Despite flaws in the picture, it has remained one of my favourites over the years. The evident grain is due to the fast 3200-speed black and white film I was using. Many people think this photograph was taken in Spain, another misinterpretation which I quite enjoy. Taken altogether, the girl and her outfit, the brick wall, the grain, gives the impression of a photograph from another place, another time long ago, certainly not modern Los Angeles.

If you like this image and wish to leave a comment, please do so over at this photo's entry on my blog at juanluis.com.

Vince

The formality of this portrait, and something about the pose of the subject, his regality, recalls to me early portrait photography from the 19th century. I think of old politicians, businessmen, that sort of thing. Let's just ignore that it's a dog with a runny nose for a moment. This was Vincent, or as we called him, Vince.

When I moved to Los Angeles, John was one of the first people I met, bonding over David Lynch and Woody Allen movies. John had an enviable artistry and talent that didn't come from education or upbringing. He'd dropped out of university, lived on the beach carving juggling sticks, followed the Grateful Dead around selling his wares, played on a professional Mexican basketball team and apprenticed with a local carpenter, amongst many other things. Most recently he learned computer graphics and then landed a job at the same company as I did around the same time. He had a talent for casual, brilliant exagerration (I take everything you say and divide it by three, someone once said to him). It didn't take long for him to climb to the top. In him I saw a true American story, Californian reinvention at its best. I didn't know anyone like that in England (and come to think of it, I still don't). He didn't drive, an anomaly in LA, and although he would take the bus to and from work, when we worked late he would ask for a ride home. I would take him to his flat on the beach in Marina Del Rey, and we would take Vince out for a walk in the dark, trying to avoid the beach cops ticketing locals for doing this very thing, as everyone flaunted the dogs-must-be-on-a-lead rule.

To recover from one of our shared film projects John took a flat in Paris for a month. When he came back it was with a new fiance. Nine inevitable months later, a baby. Within a year he had found a great job in Chicago, and with his now perfectly demographically formed family he decamped to the suburbs of Illinois. It was during a bitterly cold December visit to them in Downer's Grove, Illinois, in 2000 that I snapped this picture of Vince. I'd always loved this picture, but as with any piece of art or music, it's interesting to see how some pieces lose their appeal over time, while others seem to deepen. Improbably, it was only a few weeks ago that I noticed that his nose was running!

A couple of years ago I got a hush-hush email from John, asking if I would be a reference for a job he was going for, this time in Australia. Of course, I answered. He was offered the job, and again decamped with the family.

Vince had followed John all around North America on his various adventures, but was not destined to accompany him to Australia. His heart gave out somewhere over the Pacific. I'm wary of becoming maudlin especially with stories of faithful pet companions, yet the relationship that develops over those years is a real one. To this day John has not been able to talk to me about what happened. When I walk past the picture of Vince every day in our flat he looks back at me, his expression inscrutable. I feel as if he's trying to tell me something, but I can discern what it is. Then again, he is a dog, after all.

Mt Tamalpais Cataract Trail

When I was putting together a portfolio of photos, this image of a waterfall on Mt Tam, taken in 2002, was first on my list.

Of all the things I miss most about Marin, Mt Tamalpais is at the top of the list. The Cataract Trail, on the mostly un-crowded north side of the mountain, has not just this waterfall but a whole chain of them, and is a treat from February through May. It's also a testament to the quantity of sites of natural beauty in California that Mt Tam goes almost unnoticed to everyone but the locals. The majority of tourists are herded into the grove of redwoods in Muir Woods. Mt Tam remains marginally more famous with mountain bikers as the place where mountain biking was invented back in the 70s.

The challenge here was that I don't like to hike with all the heavy photo gear, tripods, etc. so to get longer exposure time I needed, I had to find a place to support the camera. Fortunately there's a viewing platform with a nice flat wooden railing. A steady hand and a few blurry test frames later..

If you like this, the photo or the accompanying blurb, please leave a comment over at the juanluis.com blog!

San Francisco Marathon

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune of having the above photograph included in the San Francisco Marathon. They solicited work from a number of San Francisco artists to adorn the mile markers of the race. My photo was Mile 5, at the end of Crissy Fields on the hill towards the Golden Gate Bridge.

The picture is one of a set that I took of Donna while she was training for her first Boston marathon. You can read the gory details here, when I blogged about it at the time.



This is another one of my favourites from that day, smudgy light blooms and all.

Whether amateur or pro, training for a marathon often takes on a story of its own beyond the simple routine. In my own running and cycling, and especially with Donna and her group of athletic friends, I see the way the training and the races can distill people's daily lives and struggles into something universally recognisable. In documenting their various races I've tried to get at those moments, and in doing so provide an alternative to the standard by-the-numbers race photographs.

You see more examples of my running and race photographs here on flickr. I am interested in following and documenting people during their training for a marathon, or similar endurance event. If you or someone you know would be interested in this, I would love to hear from you - contact info here.

As for the marathon itself, I was unfortunately unable to be there in person, but I had spies on the ground keep an eye out for it. Here's what I got -




Looks like it was a good, foggy, summer San Francisco day! Anyway, I was delighted to be included in the event. They auctioned off (for charity) the banner and a large mounted print I made. Actually I bought the banner for myself (I couldn't resist!), and I am waiting on word about who bought the print itself. If you're interested in the picture, they are selling posters of it here.

juanluis dot com

new directions

My new website juanluis.com, created to focus purely on my photography, is up and running. It's been active for a while (I bought the domain in 1998), and one of my goals last year when I left ILM was to get it up and running. It's only in the last week that it was presentable. Amongst other things, it includes a portfolio and a blog, to keep people abreast of my latest projects and photos.

DonJuanna isn't going away. DonJuanna came about because I'd wanted to create an online journal long before 'blog' was in the dictionary, but it took an extended trip to Spain in 2005 as an excuse to do something about it. I want to keep DonJuanna in its current form, where I riff on whatever nonsense occurs to me, post occasional film reviews, music gig reviews, tales of life in London, stories about film visual effects, the occasional photos and latest news about me and Donna. I will be cross posting any entries in the juanluis.com blog here as well, so you wont be missing anything if you stay here.

If, however, all you've ever found interesting here were the photographs, then I recommend you switch your bookmarks and rss readers over to blog.juanluis.com.

In the short term I'll be spending more time on juanluis.com, getting things up and running and hopefully attracting a whole new slew of people over there, so if the next few posts here are photo-content heavy, don't be surprised!

Tourist Traps

We recently returned from our annual holiday to Spain (photographs coming soon..), this one distinguished by it being the first time Donna's parents and sister had been there. We hoped it would be a holiday of part adventure, culture and relaxation. It was all those things, not always in equal measure.

No holiday is complete without going through a bit of old fashioned tourist-fleecing. Three quite different places managed to make us part with more than their share of our hard-earned cash.

Madrid: Bar 'Iowa'

Just off the Gran Via in central Madrid, with one of the only outdoor terraces nearby, I had a feeling it was going to be an old-fashioned tourist trap. Still, with the table of Mexicans drinking extra-large pale beer next to us, and the hookers plying their trade during the daylight hours a few feet away, I hoped the three of us (me, Donna, her sister) might escape unscathed. The career waiter tried to order for us, we countered with what we actually wanted. The jamón was the cheap and cheerful kind, getting dry from being left out too long, a plate of manchego of the simplest sort, and the single melon order came as three large slices, tasty, washed down with some tinto de verano (cheap wine and lemonade). It all went sour when he tried to charge us 53 euros for something that should have been 20, 25 euros tops. I complained about the obvious tourist prices, he tried to tell us the jamón was the finest, de ibérico, and challenged us to compare what he charged us with what was on the menu inside. He was a seasoned pro. We bitched and moaned but forked over the cash. At least we got a good show from the daytime hookers, watching them pick up trade (one guy afterwards escaped into the subway, smoking a cigarette. Another young man hired their services, in good physical shape except he was missing his arms), which almost made it worth it.

Xátiva: Hostería Mont Sant

This hotel, featured in the otherwise reliable Sawday's Special Places To Stay, came with accolades in all the guide books, prizes and awards and all that, and a price tag to match. Located half way up the hill from the village to its ancient Castle, it was superbly located (though the drive through the narrow village streets on the way up was harrowing to say the least). We picked it after several days of heavy cultural tourism as we were in need of a place where we could relax by the pool in the morning and the Mediterranean beach in the afternoon.

Maybe it was the way they left us to drag our luggage up the hill the quarter of a mile to the rooms (the row of connected rooms, in a separate building resembling a large outhouse, that they charitably called cabins). Maybe it was the front desk attendant who didn't look at you directly and who couldn't keep track of anything, least of which the four times we asked for towels without receiving any, culminating in a 1am trip when he asked me if I was sure I'd looked inside all the cupboards? Maybe it was the feeling of a place that had no real competition, received all the accolades, and no longer felt like it needed to try any more?

Was it fine (my favourite damning with faint praise)? Yes. Was it worth 160+ euros a night? Err, no.

Las Pedroñeras: Las Rejas

If you read somewhere that there was an above-average place to eat called The French Laundry, and it happened to lie along the path of your trip from point A to point B, how you would feel when you walked in to find a place that charged $250 for its tasting menu? If you didn't know that it was considered the finest restaurant in America, and one of the top five in the world, would you feel misled and cheated out of a lot of money?

This is the problem that faced us on our way from Valencia to Madrid, crossing the immense plains of La Mancha, except that instead of The French Laundry, we wandered into Las Rejas in the utterly unremarkable village of Las Pedroñeras. We wanted to eat somewhere nice for lunch, somewhere other than the roadside picnic table or the bog standard Spanish bar. An online search seemingly hit jackpot.

We were a little taken aback when the restaurant menu (lunchtime, let's not forget) had an 80 euro tasting menu, a 65 euro Menú del Día, and an a la carte menu that charged 24 euros for a small plate of decent but ordinary manchego cheese, and few things less than 35 euros. The pushy, arrogant waiters, forcing us all into a corner where if we didn't all order the daily menu as a table then we couldn't order it at all. Where, despite our protestations, we were pushed to order a magnum bottle of wine (at lunch!), and met with obvious disdain when we wanted to order just a couple of starters and share ("are you sure you don't want to order more? There's not very much there". Needless to say it was plenty of food). Where every bottle of water and piece of bread was overcharged to the max.

We enjoy interesting places and culinary adventures. Donna and I are happy to pay for unusual, high quality restaurants. When people ask "was it worth it at the French Laundry?", the fact is that if you're ready to spend over $300 a person for a meal, your sense of what things are worth is less about individual plates of food and more about a whole experience, which you either value before going inside and are therefore willing to pay for, or not. The same way I can't fathom spending that kind of money on a ticket to a football match, but many other people feel differently.

What I keep coming back to, less than the actual cost of the meal, was the way in which the waiters wanted to force us to experience the restaurant on their terms (which just happened to add on euros left and right). Aside from souring our experience of the otherwise excellent food, it implies both an arrogance and an insecurity about the food. And though the chef Manuel de la Osa might have been crowned chef of the year in Spain for several years, considering that his restaurant was full of French, English and a small group of wandering Americans, I wonder what might happen if he lowered his prices, let the place breathe a little, and let a few of his fellow manchegan villagers through the doors, see what they have to say about not being able to order the Menú del Día the way they like it.