Statuesque

A few years ago, I walked three weeks of the camino Santiago in Northern Spain.  All I carried for a camera was a little Cannon g12, but it served me well and proceeded to kick the bucket just after the trip.  While walking, I tried to stop in each of the little towns, as well as the big cites and do a little sightseeing.  Somewhere, that I cannot recall, I visited in an ancient church that was being renovated.  The day was rainy, but the light was beautiful.  To protect the weathered old statues, workers had covered them in a protective netting.  There was something so eerie and haunting about these figures.  This week, I took these images as my inspiration.  Rather than netting, I chose fabric, but the result is similar.

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4/52 San Juan de los Lagos

Every year, twelve million pilgrims visit the small Mexican town of San Juan de los Lagos.  It is one of the most venerated sights in Mexico, second only to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City (where you can view Juan Diego’s cloak with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe).  The faithful and curious, come to San Juan de los Lagos to see a small thirty-eight centimeter statue made in the 1500’s of sugarcane paste.  Known as the “Smiling” Virgin, “Cihuapilli” in Nahuatl, or just the “Great Lady,” her first miracle is said to have dated back to 1623:

“A family of acrobats had a show which included “flying” over a field of spear points. The seven-year-old daughter fell onto the spears during the act and immediately died. Local women brought the image to the body and prayed over it when the child revived. This miracle made the image famous.[6] Since then, many other miracles have since been attributed to her intercession, often related to recuperation from mortal danger or dangerous illnesses.[7]

Today, many pilgrims still walk on foot to see the virgin, just as they have for hundreds of years.  For this particular pilgrimage, the faithful leave from cites all over Mexico to arrive in San Juan de los Lagos on February second for Candlemas.  Candlemas, is a celebration held forty days after the birth of Jesus, commemorating when Mary was recovered from childbirth and her motherhood was blessed in the church.  This small town of 55,000 inhabitants is mobbed with over two million visitors this weekend alone.  Many flock there to fulfill promises made to the virgin over the past year, lest they be turned to stone!

I was invited to walk with C.A.S.A., an organization for whom I have been volunteering over the past several months.  They provide everything from women’s healthcare, childcare, violence and sexual education programs, GLBT awareness, exercise classes, radio shows, midwife training, and so much more.  On this day, we were walking with the pilgrims as they left San Miguel de Allende to bring attention to the high rates of domestic violence suffered by women across Mexico. Leaving the central square at five am, we walked for about seven hours, as the sun came up over Guanajuato’s beautiful farm country and wild deserts.

Around noon, we headed back to town, and the pilgrims walked on to complete the first of nine days and an over one-hundred-and-twenty-five mile journey.  I arrived home, spent, exhausted, and sore, yet also buoyed, floating, and high.  After a hot bath, and much thanks for a warm bed instead of a night in a tent, I realized I needed more.  Immediately, I made plans to find the pilgrims the following day and continue walking.  Enlisting a good friend, we spent the morning in a taxi chasing down the procession.  They had risen before dawn, to start walking in the cool morning air and had already covered a tremendous distance.  Astounded, it took us almost thirty minutes by car to find them, we could not believe they had already walked more than twenty-five miles in less than two days.  This feat seems fairly plausible, until you realize that at least a third of the pilgrims are over sixty-five and walk with canes, another third are carrying infants or pushing strollers barely suitable for a doll, and the rest are young and able bodied but carry banners, huge crosses, and litter-boxes with venerated saints.  Even so, after the first day, many were limping, their sore feet and nasty blisters the result of walking in miserable cheap sneakers.  Yet they carried on, lifted by the prayer, song, the spirit of the collective and the power of their faith.

A few years ago, I walked three weeks worth of the Camino Santiago in northern Spain, another ancient pilgrimage route dating back to the era of the Knights Templar.  According to pilgrim mythology, along the way, the “angels” of the Camino will often greet you and pass on their blessings.  These assorted souls, generally come out of nowhere and drift back into the ether, but bring you exactly what you need to carry on.  On one very rainy, cold, day, in a section of the Camino where there are no villages for several kilometers, I was feeling discouraged and I had stopped to stretch and rest.  Along came a tiny bowlegged old man, no taller than five feet, wearing a ratty, red, rain poncho and using a long wooden walking staff.

Like a medieval storybook character, his walking stick was adorned with a dangling scallop shell and gourd, both ancient symbols of the Camino.  In his other hand, he had a plastic grocery bag that held a bottle of red wine and few oranges.  Other than that, he carried nothing.  He stopped, pealed an orange and offered me half.  Having walked alone for days, I was in desperate need of companionship, and this was an extraordinary blessing.  We walked together for several hours, and although my Spanish was poor, he told me that he had walked the whole Camino over forty times, and that it was his annual vacation.  This is really something considering the Camino is over five hundred miles long.  Although, I glimpsed him here and there, and he checked in on me every few days to see that I was well, he left me that afternoon with the taste of orange in my mouth and the inspiration to continue my journey.

The pilgrimage to San Juan de los Lagos is no different, and within a few hours of walking on the second day, we met a man in his mid seventies.  This gentleman, had walked to see the virgin every year of his life.  He laughed and told jokes, and then he noted that we had such fair skin compared to his deep walnut brown.  Although, skin color is common topic of conversation in Mexico, and the basis of much classism, what followed was a beautiful discussion of how our hearts are what matter, not our skin color.  This is a deep seated beliefs of mine, but at the moment, it came from a place of such pure love that it was utterly moving. Eventually, our younger legs out paced our companion. When we stopped to wait for him under a tree, even after a long break, he never came, and we were left wondering if he really existed at all.  Repacking our snacks, we walked on, only to encounter even more sweet “angels” on the way.

Along the route, the local villagers come out to support the pilgrims and hand out water, atole, coffee, bread, and fruit.  One of these was a lovely elderly woman, who stopped me as I walked by.  She had pyramids of mandarins, oranges, sweet lemons, and peanuts laid out on a tarp.  She wanted me to photograph the man with whom she sat and to tell me his story.  I am still unsure of their relation, if they were father and daughter, or husband and wife, as their Spanish was colloquial, accented and tough to understand.  What I did glean, was that he was ninety years old and spry, a gift he attributed to previous pilgrimages to see the virgin.  Although a bit hunched over, he fell to his knees to show me that he was still strong enough to dig in his garden, and claimed he was pain free after all these years.  When he laughed, his toothless smile was one of the worlds most radiant and joyous.  We talked to them for a while, taking lots of photos, and when we set off, they handed us a huge plastic bag full of oranges picked from their own trees.  Later in the day, as we climbed a long hot hill, that bag got heavier and heavier, but the fruit was incredibly delicious on our bus ride home and ultimately became the inspiration for this week’s photo.

In both of my pilgrimage experiences, the orange has become the symbol of my journey.  An orange is such a humble offering, yet so full of abundance and the sweetness of life.  Each time, I was overwhelmed with the kindness this gift represented and I hope to never forget the potency of this simple form of generosity.  Thus, for my image, I chose to show a pilgrim approaching the virgin, at the end of her travels, offering an orange.  She has nothing more to give, yet could not give anything more.  The orange in this image, is one my “angels” gave me that afternoon.

The Pilgrimage:

Janelle_Pietrzak-10The doorway to the Paroquia, overflowing with pilgrims as they listen to a 4am mass before leaving for San Juan de los lagos.

Janelle_Pietrzak-12After mass, preparing to leave.

Janelle_Pietrzak-11Locals handing out a sweet hot punch, in front of the church, to warm a chilly morning.

Janelle_Pietrzak-13Traditional dances in the main square kick off the procession.

Janelle_Pietrzak-14Walking along the train tracks as the sun begins to rise.

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Janelle_Pietrzak-16The lights of San Miguel de Allende, still lit in the early morning light.

Janelle_Pietrzak-17Watching the procession.

Janelle_Pietrzak-18The young carrying crosses, banners and saints.

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Janelle_Pietrzak-25Sunrise over the Laja River.

Janelle_Pietrzak-26Local tough guys and their massive cross.

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Stopping for a free breakfast of tortillas, chicken mole, and rice.

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The procession along the road, each church had their own bullhorns and were singing and saying prayers at the same time.  Quite a racket.

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The back of the procession is followed up by men who carry stretchers, so they can ferry any fallen pilgrims along the way.

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A family rests.  These are not massive SUV strollers they push for a hundred miles.

Janelle_Pietrzak-33Much of the way is walked on hard pavement that exhausts your feet.  A crew on four wheelers stops traffic to keep the pilgrims safe.

Janelle_Pietrzak-36So many faces.

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Janelle_Pietrzak-43The path veering off the road into the harsh but beautiful Guanajuato desert.

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Pilgrims in the landscape.

Janelle_Pietrzak-2Resting under a tree.

Janelle_Pietrzak-6Local farmers taking an afternoon siesta.

Janelle_Pietrzak-4The best smile in the world.

Janelle_Pietrzak-5Beer break.

Janelle_Pietrzak-8Naughty kids take advantage of a very tired father.

Janelle_Pietrzak-9Entrepreneurs

Janelle_Pietrzak-7Mobile pilgrims hospital set up in the encampment.

4/52 – The Offering:

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The Episcopal Chapel at the General Theological Seminary

Well, It has been almost a week since we did this, and I now know why I always try to write these things the next day.  Alas, here I sit in a train station in Salamanca, Spain on my way to Madrid, I have a few hours to kill (I totally missed my train), and I need to get our final New York shoot on the web.

So, after the Times Square debacle, we shot on campus at the General Theological Seminary.  This was one of our favorite evenings, and we really wanted to come back and shoot in the chapel.  I was hesitant to just go in there and start shooting, because in general we make the places we use sacred by the act of being there.  This is a spot that is already sacred to many and I wanted to give it the respect it deserves.  So we had our good friend and student at the school, Mac Brown, send a note to the higher ups asking permission to use the chapel.  We were warmly welcomed.

The chapel is Episcopalian and was built in the late 1800’s.  It is warm, inviting, and smells of old books.  It is really wonderful place for contemplation and a very special place to make art.  Aloyse has been working for the Episcopal Church for a few years now, and has been following her own path with their guidance.  I think for her, getting the chance to make art in a personally sacred place was really important.  We had a lot of fun working with Mac Brown.  As I have almost never attended church services and did not know any of the traditions, he helped us with a lot of the staging.

We started buy creating several images of our own design, the most successful being the act of bowing to each other and ourselves with respect and devotion.   Next, we approached the altar as if receiving communion, and then did a version of the lector reading to the seminarians.  The final image was Mac’s idea and involves the Orante.  This is an ancient position of prayer, the Orante referring specifically to the female with her arms out stretched and palms raised to the heavens.

This was such a nice shoot to wrap up three weeks of hard work.  I am now on my own without a partner in crime.  I am planning on working a lot, but there is nothing like the act of collaboration to inspire great work.  If I am not traveled out, I might stop in NYC on my way home for another two weeks and a few more chances to make art with my bestie.  We shall see… “God willing,” as they say.

The Highline

I’m not really sure what my problem was last night.  Maybe it was the full moon, maybe it was the fact that I have not slept in my own bed in weeks, or maybe I was just being crabby.  Nonetheless, when we got to our shooting sight last night and I realized that Alyose’s tripod’s quick plate was practically welded onto my camera, and would not work with my new tripod, I started cursing like a sailor, and tried to give up on the shoot.  Aloyse would have none of it!  She made me rig up the camera with books, Luna bars, eyeglass cases, and we actually got a few really nice shots, despite my lack luster attitude.

Last night we shot out on the new Highline Park, an elevated abandoned train trestle, turned walking park, through the Chelsea neighborhood.  This beautiful new addition to the city makes for great views, and a lovely shooting backdrop.  The full moon behind herringbone clouds in the background was not too shabby either.  I really want to return to this space for a re-shoot, as I feel like we could greatly expand what we started (especially with a tripod). Unfortunately, I am leaving NYC in 4 days, to head to Spain for a month, and we have a pretty full schedule until then that does not include re-dos.  It is possible that I will be returning here for an extra two weeks when I get back from Spain, we shall see.

We ended the night with some white wine at the Drunken Horse and continued the theme of ‘drinking with friends is the greatest art of all.’  Taking over the back of the bar, and generally irritating our polish bartender, Aloyse, Mark and I did a bit of musical chairs for the camera. A special thanks goes out to all of our collaborators last night, Mark Schultze, JP Magenis, and Justine Evans.

The General Theological Seminary or the Times Square Debacle

We met at Times Square for the second time, to no avail.  That place is damn hard to shoot.  Noisy, crowded, bright lights and dark spots, enough neon to simulate true daylight at night, working there is an effort in futility.  We are tiny, just another attraction, as tourists take our photos we become part of the madness.  We walk away feeling defeated.  We got no good images from the shoot, nothing even worth putting up here.  It feels so depressing.  We insist that we will return, that we will get the shot, but I wonder.  Maybe sparkly dresses will help.

Then at 11:30pm we decide to head across the street to the campus of the General Theological Seminary.  We have the keys.  We let the dogs off their leashes to play on the lush green grass, a magical oasis on this gritty island.  The school once owned most of the area, I think 140 acres, or what is all of Chelsea.  Now it is just an enclosed city block, with dorms in the surrounding area.  We needed a re-do, a confidence builder, a reminder that yes we can make beautiful, meaningful images, that Times Square had not sucked out or souls.

We donned our new matching dresses, and carried candles on to the close.  This felt so safe, so natural, so relaxed, and so easy.  We effortlessly, began our process of creating, of using light and location.  Obviously, it is easier to create in such a beautiful quiet environment, but shooting there versus Times Square made us think about the nature of the work we were creating.  What we do has such an inherent spiritual quality, for us and for the resulting images.  I think shooting in Times Square, the epicenter of consumer culture, really drains that spirituality away from us.  Where as shooing on a theological campus inherently fills us up with that mysticism.

Does this mean we should abandon Times Square?  That we should shoot in only sacred spaces?  I am not sure, but I really don’t think so.  I think that Times Square, like any trial by fire, pushes us to our limits, to the nature of our faith.  It has not happened yet, but I think if we can make strong and meaningful images there, it will be a great accomplishment.  We must now think of the ritual, the dance that can protect us from the overwhelming nature of Times Square.

Meanwhile, we have this…which basically rocks: