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This interview is not like the others. Manuel Rivera-Ortiz gave me an interview in which he opens his heart and tells us his battle. I publish this interview with the certainty that Manuel will also win this battle. “Once in a while an interview comes along that inspires you. This one inspired me.” These words sent me a few hours ago make me proud to have interviewed a photographer which is above all a great man, that through his foundation is doing so well for the others, showing another time that ohotography sometimes can change something in the world.

 

Hi Manuel, how did you get into photography? And when did it become a profession?

I never intended for photography to become a profession, though it was always a passion dating back to childhood! My passion for photography began in the 70s as a child growing up in the barrios of Guayama (Puerto Rico). That was when I was living for a time with my grandparents. Abuelita, her name was Concepción, she passed away a few years back at nearly 100, used to love pictures and she always made sure I got to see the pictures of us she kept in her purse. At the time it wasn’t unusual for a grandchild to be adopted by a grandparent; for that matter this is not so unusual in Latino households in general, even today. It was during that time that I learned the value of a picture. I also remember how proudly she displayed the one studio photo of her and abuelito in the living room of the cement house in Bda. Blondet there in Guayama. So for as long as I can remember I appreciated pictures as a human record of having lived, of having loved and of having been here.

The type of picture I make now, poverty, the disenfranchised, the landless, in developing countries, has everything to do with the fact that I grew up so poor. Papá worked as a sugar cane farmer on the island, and on the off-season as a migrant in New England especially in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Mamá didn’t have a formal job so she stayed at home and took care of us. The two of them were barely educated. Together they completed a total of about 8 years of formal education. In those days, like today in many a poor neighborhood around the world it was difficult for children to finish school because it was much more important to have them be around to help in the house or even get a job early than to waste time with books or school.

 

This is where my photography comes in. Photography to me is a culmination of several life experiences both on and off the island. Off course there were the random photo classes I took during the Massachusetts Migrant Education Program — a summer school for the children of migrant families — in Holyoke. Then, many years later, came the random meeting of an amazingly crazy and amazing curator in New York by the name of Monique Goldstrom (originally from Romania) who took me under her wing and put my work on the map starting with the Cuba images. [I lost Monique to cancer only months after my first show at Credit Suisse on Madison Avenue. That was a terrible loss.] There was also my experience in the newsroom as a journalist, coupled with my creative work, my work as a model for 18 years for Kodak and Xerox in front of the camera, and many other experiences which culminate to create this moment.

 

Photography as a career is tough for anyone. Photography is expensive, it is competitive, it is fleeting, it is amazing yet disappointing, it has the power to create change yet no power at all in vast quantities; it is rewarding, it is upsetting, unsettling and fulfilling all at the same time. Today with so many digital cameras out in the wild it is downright impossible to make a name, and that name, should one be doing this type of work for the right reason, for humanity, being so incredibly crucial for the attention of the work you do which, in-turn, hopefully, translates into the higher goal of attention for the subjects and stories in our images. Competition and saturation does have its benefit. Saturation means that we are now seeing pictures coming from every corner and place where before we could only see images for hire executed by the very few.

 

So to answer your question, I do not see my work as a profession but rather as a thing I must do for me, for my family, for the people in my pictures. I don’t sell my work, it is all out of pocket. I don’t ask for money I just do what I can with what I have. I still shoot with a 11-year-old analog Nikon F5 bought for me. I’m not in this to impress anybody, I’m in this to tell the stories as best I can of the dignity of the people and the lives I know personally so well. It took Monique two years to convince me to show my work. Frankly, I thought the woman was crazy! But, here I am today, foundation and all, 360 degrees from where I thought I would actually be.

 

 

Your work is Social documentary photography focused on humanitarian issues often ignored by mainstream media. Do you think that photography can improve the world? Throughout your career you have had evidence of this?

I don’t think that photography by itself, in general, can improve the world. I think that pictures can move people to want to do something, to help, but this doesn’t always turn into action. As a photographer you have to also add of yourself, to do what you can to sell your stories. Pictures in and of themselves are simply not enough in the “real” world. Therefore I, we, have to tell our own stories and share our own experiences! So a picture, then, becomes a catalyst, an inspiration, a vehicle of hope or aspiration of hope and the photographer its ambassador and deliverer. I take pictures because I hope that coupled with my own story of hardship the pictures will have traction for those people in the pictures. Together, my story and theirs, then becomes the message: The message being “us people who have had or currently have hardship want to speak and here’s what we have to say through a picture.” If told well, this can be a strong and moving message. I think that for the message to ultimately succeed requires a lineup of several things to happen. First, there the desire to help. Second, there must be some kind of personal connection or experience with the subject or topic. Third, the viewer has to already have an emotional bent toward humanitarianism, a certain socio-political agenda that can will a climate or bend timing toward a cause. The challenge is to try to hit as many of these instances at once as possible to improve the chances of the message being heard. To me it is an amalgamation of so many facets that make a picture move and cause change. It is tough to measure whether pictures move real palpable change. Many times when people react socially they do it quietly and privately. My work has moved some, yes, even corporations to give and to care. But for the limited time I have I think my time would be better spent doing and telling rather than measuring or counting. People come to my shows and say they have been moved to do this or that so in a ‘hear-say’ way that’s measurable. But I think measurable in this instance is not mathematical. Instead, it is a heart; it is condition, it is human, and that you cannot measure.

 

What is your idea of reportage photography today? I see too much homogenization and even homologation of the proposal…do you agree?

I think this is a very critical, interesting yet exciting time for reportage photography. Digital has introduced photography from all sides and all levels of experience. How this is good is that for all of the ‘professional photographers’ practicing out there the world is still much too big a place for us to cover alone. In comes the street shooter, the mom and pop or neighbor with a camera on their iPhone with access to the right place at the right time. This proliferation helps fill in the gaps in the ‘professional’ world of image making. This is very important not for us photographers, but for the communities we photograph which should always come first. That said, I do also believe that there is a certain amount of truth to homologation. I see so many images nowadays look so much like each other. It’s becoming like technology and smartphones; everything is special and yet nothing is special because it all looks the same. I am old school about image capture, I like my pictures how they got recorded. I love Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ilse Bing, Dorothea Lange, their pictures are some kind of pure, from the hip, printed and edited raw; no color warming or photoshop perfecting, just pictures… just people in a picture. I was covering 9/11, UA93 in Shanksville, PA, last year for our now sister organization 24h.com in Paris. I remember standing there in the PRESS core suddenly watching a newspaper photographer on his laptop toning and warming up his images prior to sending them to his newsroom and thinking, ‘is that legal?’ While I understand that images need to be corrected somehow prior to printing digitally, I also think that these tools are dangerous and mostly I try to use my images as I took them. This may not make me popular, but I saw first hand how the images of one well known photographer are manipulated to feel, taste amazing and to conform to a certain modern “norm.” This bothers me because it forces the question of are the images we make art, journalism, art-journalism? Or are they a personal take on reality; and not meant as a respectful and honest interpretation of truth via a camera? Standardized imagery does not appeal to me. I like blur, I like imperfection, I like raw and I like human. I prefer photography by the seat of my pants, not by the seat of my photoshop. The good celebrity world of historical reportage imagery is imperfect, grainy and dusty and even bad sometimes with poor lighting and poor circumstances. When you begin to introduce software induced finesse it starts remaking truths into perfected snippets of warm tones and controlled messages. No doubt this makes for a lovelier presentation, but is that really what moves people into action? Or, what I believe more to the truth, move people into collection? Then we wonder why nobody really looks anymore. People are not that stupid. Have you ever stopped to consider how in some well known photography magazines picture presentations by completely different photographers in completely different environments all somehow magically look the same and feel the same! I am left speechless. That’s not real life, that’s manipulated life.

 

Who inspires you and your work?

Anyone who does this type of work inspires me. Also, foremost perhaps, the children living under bridges. They inspire me the most. Families struggling, communities striving for better in the face of adversity. As far as other photographers if they come to this with honesty of heart, they find an ear with me.

 

Through the Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation you created a worthwhile initiative: the prize is aimed mainly at emerging underrepresented photographers… Latin America and Photography. There is still so much to document…naturally starting from the severe poverty faced by these countries. A not-for-profit organization like yours how it can help Latin America?

I hope that as the years progress, more and more photographers from Latin-America will rise and have their work and the causes important to Latin America be counted as part of a very global, important conversation about humanity. If for no other reason than that I myself have a latino name, I hope that our initiative  serves as an inspiration here. Until now you get the feeling that Latin-American pictures suffer from a bit of a lack of attention internationally. I hope this changes. I am inspired that the jury this year selected Gustavo Jononovich of Argentina. But, I would also be very pleased to have photographers from other regions of the world be selected. The foundation is not American or Latin-American, it is international…it belongs to all of us. This effort is a matter of empowering all people everywhere including Latin America.

 

Describe the story behind one of the most memorable images you have shot.

“Widow of the Mines” is one of my favorite pictures. It was done in Bolivia in Potosí. That picture epitomizes the value of family and home and loss and responsibility all of which are such human experiences and emotions. The woman in the picture is remembering the loss of her husband to a cave collapse during silver mining. She, like other women such as her who have lost their husbands to the mines, sits at the foot of the mountain sifting through spent rock to find little bits of silver to barter in town for food for her family. There is no pension to collect, no aid, just her scarred, calloused hands there under a tarp and a lot of hope. While the circumstances are different, this woman could just have been my mother who every day washed our clothes by the river or carried buckets of water on her head from the stream half a mile away to keep us cared for under such hardship. My pictures mirror my past, I think this too is inevitable.

 

How would you describe your work?

Humanitarian. Here’s why I say that… growing up like that does something to you psychologically, it marks you. Every time I pull that camera up to your face you cannot help but think about how ironically familiar the person or persons you are about to photograph are to a life you already lived. So to me these pictures are not for cute or or show or display, they are an homage to family; to mamá by her fogón cooking in the late afternoon; to papá toiling on hot Caribbean days in the sugar cane fields wading through mud trenches with machete and fiambrera in hand; to abuelita collecting coffee beans by mountainside in Carite in Guayama; to us kids learning to break open coconuts with rocks in order to have something to eat whenever there was no food in the house which was often. My imagery then is an homage to my life, my family, my people and by extension, to this extraordinary global family that has become etched in my memory.

 

Documentary photography requires a preparation, a prior practical study. How would you explain your methodology or creative process?

I let my emotions do the talking. This isn’t something you can learn in school. One of my newsroom editors once told me that she could teach me how to write a feature story ’till she turned blue in the face and I would be damn good at it, but she couldn’t teach me how to have a voice because this, she said, I already had! This is my method, my rime or reason, the driving force behind my images; I let feeling, heart, compassion, school of hard knocks, emotions charge the way.

 

Other than photojournalism are there any other genres of photography you like, or would like to explore?

Art photography. Unfortunately you don’t want to confuse an audience so i don’t do it much. I enjoy landscape also. Maybe I’ll do more of either in the coming years.

 

Reading your biography you were born into a poor family on a barrio on the Caribbean coast of Puerto Rico. Your roots are inside of you. How has this influenced your visual search?

I don’t think anyone can really fully understand the why of their lives. I think that when people go through so much and come out on the other side only to be challenged again they become obsessed with the why of things: Like why did I have to be so poor, why did my father drink so much, why did my other beat me, why did kids make fun of me in school… one never finds answers to these questions now imbedded in your psyche. You spend a lifetime trying, pointlessly, to figure out the “why” because somehow logically it must all have an answer! But the truth of the matter is that sometimes there is no answer. Sometimes it is what it is, and you just have to accept that the bruises and the experiences are all yours to carry alone. Still, that doesn’t stop you from either exposing the horrors of living now that you have a “voice,” or from taking pictures that somehow speak to your own experiences. I will always be looking for an answer.

 

One last question: next challenge for Manuel Rivera-Ortiz?

To surmount my current battle. I was recently diagnosed with cancer, the same that challenged bicyclist Lance Armstrong. Though technically more mild, it has, nevertheless, been a bit of an unexpected to do. Tomorrow I’ll be treated to a round of chemo therapy.

Featured image caption: “In Loss and Celebration,” Varanasi, India, 2003: Holy bathers and mourners of the dead descend upon the holy River Ganges for a holy bath as well as for mourning and burning of the dead at the river’s edge during the mythical celebration of Diwali. Pilgrimage to the Ganges River is considered a must do for all Indian people of faith as well as an ideal place for the burning of the dead. Manuel Rivera-Ortiz; American (b. Puerto Rico, 1968); Kodak Ektachrome Elite Chrome 200/36; Nikon F5/17-35 mm lens; Copyright © 2012.

All the images courtesy By Manuel Rivera-Ortiz, protected by copyright © 2012