Teaching Photography: Notes Assembled

Hector Garcia

37 Several years ago I met a photographer named Hector Garcia. It was in Guadalajara at one of those gatherings of photographic types called a symposium. Hector was no longer young and not always sober, but he had a great spirit and a wonderful tale to tell. He spoke of being very young, a child, living in the extreme poverty of Mexico City. When his mother went to work, out of desperation she would tie him to the bed in a dark room. There was a keyhole in the door that quite by accident functioned as a pin-hole lens and projected the activities of the street onto the wall opposite. That became Hector’s world of impressions. He said it was this experience (he did not say how long it lasted) that was his first photography. He has continued for the next 70 or so years to make pictures. At the final meeting of the symposium, Hector took off all his clothes backstage hoping that some of the women photographers would take pictures of him. I’m not sure of the connection between the two events, but the bittersweet quality of both is quite telling. His tale also seems to demonstrate that photographic imagery is not an invention at all, but rather a phenomenon that occurs when circumstances converge in a certain way, similar to rainbows and hail. Is it possible that this is why some of the animals in cave paintings of pre-history are upside down? Photographic projection does that. HECTOR GARCIA ...