Monday, March 5, 2007

Aguilera-Hellweg: disquieting pictures

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From: Max Aguilera-Hellweg
Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2007 19:48:27 -0500no1.

no1.

I feel that my thoughts, feelings and experience here echo that of the journalist robin marantz henig, her post at 10:46am today. I am a photographer, and then became a doctor, and have come back to taking pictures again. Prior to entering medical school I’d photographed well over a hundred surgeries. When I first started out I was on an assignment, but I returned because I had to. It was this incredible mystery I had to return to again and again. When I first began to show the work to people I didn’t realize that some would have trouble with it, and when I got the first comments of disgust, I was troubled, didn’t know how to respond. But I continued because I had to, however, after awhile the difficult comments I received began to wear on me, and I began to doubt what I was going. The attacks were mean and vile. It took some time, but slowly I began to realize that I need to continue, not for the people who respected my work, who trusted was I was doing, who found it even beautiful, but for those who couldn’t even open their eyes to it. I needed to continue for them. What I realized was that the work I was producing was like a Rorschach test, that peoples responses said more about them, then it did about me. The images confronted their sense of mortality, and for those who could not face this truth, their vision of a “good death” at risk, even shattered, I realized I needed to keep taking pictures for them, so that one day, they would have a library, a book of pictures, a “production of Knowledge” if you will, that they could come to, if they wished, and slowly peel away their fear. As I entered medical school, learned anatomy on a host of cadavers who only weeks before had uttered their last breaths, learned medical science, and entered the wards as a medical student I saw that fear first hand, but this time it was real in the eyes of a man with terminal COPD who struggled for each breath the last 36 hours of his life. the fear in his eyes was palpable. Yet I did not have the experience to understand what I was seeing, the knowledge of his disease, to know his death was eminent, or know I could have intervened. a morphine drip to help him breathe and ease his way out perhaps. I’ll never forget his eyes. As months and years moved on, my experience, knowledge and responsibility increasing, I gained an interns knack to tell if someone was not going to leave the hospital and acted with all my skill, training and resources to help those I could to make their way home. More than once I found myself on familiar territory— patients and families presenting to the hospital with an unnatural fear of death, even when death was mostly likely, the disgust was most vile. I made it my responsibility to be gentle, to teach them what they needed to know, to keep them informed, to empower them, to give them the facts, that they can make the decisions that needed to be made, that maybe, just maybe, a “good death” might occur. Those who fought death had a wretched time. People still react as they always have to my photographs, some are fearful, others find their beauty.

No.3 I read the historian’s, Michael sappol’s post on no3, with great interest, especially because of the perspective of someone in his work. And despite the great things it has done for medicine, science, and the artists using it, i.e. Digital et al, digital is just a medium like any other, it does not define art, nor shall or will it always be its currency. Artists will work in whatever medium they see fit. Though I love that I have a scanner, and I love and am becoming more proficient with Photoshop, and there are no more color labs in Boston where I live, and It has become virtually impossible to travel (i.e.. Fly) with film anymore because of tsa and x-ray, I, myself, will hold out and shoot film as long as I can. Please don’t show me this post this time next year and make me eat my words.

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