Photo: Juan Gabriel Estellano

The dark room where Juan Gabriel Estellano manually develops some of his photos is much more than a humid and stagnant place where someone could turn out the lights at any given moment. It’s a room - in the courtyard of a creaking mansion - with a wardrobe covered in dust, a few straggling hangers, newspapers stacked up in a pile, a precariously-fixed water tap and other small objects that are easy to overlook or trip over as one moves around the space. It’s a five-by-three-metre hideout filled with borrowed items.

Estellano shares this space with the filing clerk and cultural director, Cristina Machicado. The room was baptised as L’obscurito and it is littered with tools, machines and utensils that are capable of transporting an idle visitor to another time period. These tools have been recycled, reworked or restored by Estellano.

‘We set up a light table on which to view negatives thanks to an ordinary table that we modified’, explains Juan Gabriel, as he shuffles boxes and folders to uncover the table’s surface. ‘We have two antique enlargers that work perfectly. One came from Cristina’s grandmother and the other from a Japanese man named Toshi Fujimoto who lets us use it. We use the enlargers with expired film and paper that Fujimoto has also given us and which we value dearly.’

Some of these rolls expired in the early 1980’s, when Juan Gabriel hadn’t even been born yet. ‘It’s really crazy because you never really know how exactly time will affect the film. Sometimes, the shots are far too overexposed and on other occasions the opposite happens’, he says. Something similar occurs with the expired paper they use to immortalise certain scenes of day-to-day family life. ‘The resulting texture, in this case, is similar to that of an old shot,’ Estellano explains. ‘It is like holding a photo from thirty years ago in your hands, something very surreal. These are photos that you’ve taken today, the day before yesterday, or two weeks ago, but they remind you of your grandparent’s house. They draw you into thinking about the subjective nature of time’.

Test Strips

On top of some bookshelves less than two metres away from where Juan Gabriel is standing, there is a handful of varied silhouettes on paper in black and white. ‘These are some of the test strips we have used to experiment with exposure and contrast’, he tells me as I approach the strips of paper. In the first one I see, a couple of Estellano’s friends are posing. In the second, it’s his father with a beret and a mate container that is nearly touching his mouth. ‘People move on, people change’, he philosophises later on, after he puts together a collage of them on the floor. ‘A photo is a single moment that we rescue, that stays with us, but that will never happen again.’

Sometimes, Juan Gabriel uses some of the outdated cameras that he brought from France when he worked there for a season as a volunteer: a Kodak Anastigmat from 30 years ago, an Agfa from the 1960’s, a Regula Picca from the 1970s, a transparent Vivitar from the 90’s and an analog Nikon from the same decade that looks very similar to the digital cameras of today.

All of the cameras were discarded: impeccable artifacts that didn’t draw the attention of their owners anymore. They had become wasted material, waiting to be thrown into the bin. All of them, before Estellano got his paws on them, used to be in the depths of the Rag and Bone collection of Emaús, an organisation that supports illegal immigrants, beggars and the unemployed. Emaús is a community that specialises in the use of refurbished items and whose members believe that some people substitute their furniture as often as they refashion their hairstyle. The organisation remind us that no object should be considered waste until it has been given a second chance.

Inspired by his experience with Emaús, Juan Gabriel filmed a documentary: La vie des choses (The life of objects). ‘I understood that objects often have many meanings’, he underlines. ‘I felt really curious. I wanted to listen to people speak about their objects.’ In Estellano’s short film, a guys relates his rolling tobacco to his time in the war in Afghanistan. Another guy becomes emotional seeing an old sewing machine that reminds him of the one his mother used. Many of the items featured in the film are domestic treasures: books with annotated margins, guitars that were restored and now sound the same as they did on the day they were first played. Keyboards, nuts and bolts used to pin up random pieces of junk. Surely, amongst these are some of the objects that ended up in Estellano’s workshop.

Today, while he shows me his rescued items, Juan Gabriel tells me that the dark room (in which he whiles away his free time) was a storage room he had to clean up thoroughly before it was fit to use and enjoy.
‘Some people believed that we would never be able to get it ready’, he smiles. Sometimes the blindest man is not the one who can’t see, but the one who simply doesn’t want to.

This text was originally published in the magazine ‘Escape del diario’ La Razón, in Bolivia

Juan Gabriel Estellan, photographer and director. His web page can be found at www.estejuanga.con

The contrast between movement and stillness

When Bolivia comes to life, it sparkles…

For myself and many, one of the most fascinating things about Bolivia is the juxtaposition of tremendous natural beauty with the chaotic culture that manifests itself in everyday life. From a photographic perspective, capturing the contrasts that make this country so unique makes life behind a lens a joy; never predictable, never boring and never failing to amaze.

Stillness and peace can be observed in every corner of the country; dramatic landscapes and views that make you question the scale of your existence on Earth. But don’t be fooled; below the surface, there’s an energy that bubbles, and you need look little further before you find yourself thrown amidst the thumping beat of Bolivian culture, witnessing movement, alive like electricity, that sparkles in every direction.

Photo: Vicky Roberts

Cables, advertisements, meaningless graffiti; posters, billboards and political propaganda: these are only some of the things that mark our urban landscape in La Paz. Practically every wall or street that you position in front of the camera is overpopulated, overwrought with elements that an artistic director would hardly place within the bounds of an optic frame; especially if the subject of the shot is something other than the streets themselves.

La Paz continues to be beautiful, a city that is highly interesting in terms of photography. But if we look at the past and contemplate photographs of the city taken at the start of the last century, it is inevitable to feel sad or ashamed about the rundown state of our city. One feels sad over the irresponsible way in which we have managed our visual environment, failing to recognize the importance that it truly deserves.

Like we do with other things in Bolivia, we take our urban landscape for granted. We think that it will always be beautiful, that it is one-of-a-kind, that it will always be that way. We are overly confident in our topography and we comfortably sit on a bench with our arms crossed, waiting for tourists to come, who will always be eager to photograph our Oh Linda La Paz.

Everything verges on contradiction and contributes to the debate because the neon-coloured posters, after all, have their own esthetic and personality; and the buildings that have been erected practically without height restrictions add personality to the city. The freedom to do things at will, without obstacles or regulations, has shaped our city, a city that grows and is only defined naturally, by the inexorable laws of space and time.

In our day-to-day in La Paz we see the type of coexistence that marks our city, the syncretism that defines it. The things that make it unique and bestow upon us invaluable photographic material, which is why the goal cannot be to Europeanise or Americanise our streets and urban landscapes. Wanting to take pictures here like the ones people take in Paris would be a big mistake. We need to maintain the essence and personality of our city, but a minimum standard needs to be urgently established if we want to maintain the attractive features of our city.

You don’t have to go far to find good examples. In the historic centre of Sucre, in Bolivia, all commercial posters follow a certain style and the houses are all painted in white. The city of Cuzco, Perú, has preserved the esthetic of its historic buildings and forced Mcdonalds and Starbucks to operate without billboard ads. We need to establish premises such as these in la Paz, where we actually have a big advantage in our favour: the city is enormous.

As an exercise, we could focus exclusively on the historical district of La Paz, which urgently needs to be revitalised, and needs to have all wires switched underground as a priority. The influx of cars needs to be further restricted in the city center. The courthouse needs to be relocated and with it all of the lawyers and photocopy shops. We need to restore the houses, the doors and the streets.

Cities definitely enter more through the eyes than through the other senses. For this reason, from the perspective of photography in times of visual contamination, I have given myself the space to reflect on an issue that every urban specialist, photographer, artist, tourist, citizen and authority should be considering.

""If we look at the past and contemplate photographs of the city taken at the start of the last century, it is inevitable to fell sad orashamed about the rundown state of our city"" 

Photo: Courtesy of Estudio Gismondi