Camera of Dirt

By Charles Bowden

Charles Bowden is the author of the controversial photo/essay book Juárez: A Laboratory of the Future (Aperture Press, 1998). That book rocked El Paso a few years back, but it made the Juárez street photographers like Julian Cardona internationally famous. Julian is now photo editor of the weekly magazine "Siete Dias" in Mexico City, but he comes home to Juárez whenever he can. Bowden "gets his mail in Tucson, but lives wherever he can." Read his Blood Orchid for a wild journey into the looming apocalypse of America's self-destruction. This article was originally printed in Aperture Magazine (No. 159) and is reprinted here with permission. He rises, his lean body unfolds from the chair in the hubbub of the market, and then he moves with feline grace, camera in hand. The table is short, dark teenagers from Oaxaca, country people who have come up more than a thousand miles to the border because they have heard rumors of work. The boys wear watches, the girls new clothes. He leans into them, his voice soft, face smiling. They have been here six months, they have a shack they share, they have jobs, and today they have Sunday off and can eat in the public market and enjoy the throb of the city. The camera comes up, he slowly bends toward the targets, the film whirls and Julian Cardona feeds. He has been at this for almost twenty years. No one asked him to do this work. That does not matter, he is about his business and his business is this border city of bruises, death, dirt and love. Talking about dirt, dust in the air chewing the city, dirt choking the lungs on a windy day, streets of dirt, yards of dirt, a city of dirt and mud and dust, talking about Juárez, two million people huddling in shacks on the flanks of the dunes to the south and west, talking about dirt and dust and mud and Juárez, the city Julian Cardona loves.

 

"This street," he says, "this street is where I walked with my girl." The calle is dust, rock, and ruts. Here, he wants it known, here when he was a boy, a teenager, he walked with his girl, down this dirt street,and see? She lived over there, and down there and up the hill, that's where he lived, back then, when he was young and in love in the city of dirt. Smoke from cooking fires floods the air, night is falling, the wind blows, he is in love, he is back there, walking with his girl. The turf is K-13, the most vicious of the hundreds of gangs in the city of dirt. No matter. Love. Here, then, and now. El Paso lights up in the dusk, not even a mile away. He hates it there, it is too cold, he explains. With a ninth grade education, he managed to
learn English. Do you know this essay, he asks, by Gore Vidal?The dust coats the tongue, the smoke sweetens the air, sewage comes off the privies. He was two, he thinks, when he declared his life for beauty. Ten when he gave up on eternity. About twenty when he was working in a factory here and he stumbled into photography, bought magazines, got a camera, taught himself everything. After that came a time working for blood and guts working class tabloids, finally the move up to the daily paper, and now at thirty-nine the life of beauty. Beauty is everywhere, even in a pebble he spied at age two. Eternity is incomprehensible, there is only now. The photograph, the thing
curators call the image, is now, this moment of beauty that exists for a second. Until devoured by the camera and made into comprehensible eternity. That's it, it is that simple. The girl he used to walk with, she married someone else. Julian Cardona lives alone and says with a laugh that the camera is his wife. And the beauty is here, in this sprawling slum of a city packed with workers in cardboard shacks, racked by drug killings, ruled by endless corruption,ignored by the rest of the planet. Beauty is here in the city of dirt and dust and mud and love and Julian Cardona is here to prove it and taste it and capture it and admire it and love it in turn. Talking about dirt. He is a brown man in a brown city. Juárez lacks water and is first and last dust. Grass, trees, flowers, they are for somewhere else. The city is a holding pen for cheap labor sucked north from the hopeless interior of Mexico. Hundreds of factories, mainly owned by Americans, assemble goods for the U.S. market safe within the tariff wall of NAFTA. The wages are twenty-five to fifty bucks a week. No one can live on them. No one. Turnover runs from 11 percent to twenty-five percent a week in the plants. And they are plants-General Motors has thirty alone in Juárez. Cheap labor, impossible living conditions, the bottomless U.S. market, violence, and dirt. There is nothing more to say about it, except to tell lies. "I have witnessed a lot of deaths," he offers," and when you are a photographer you have a chance to die so many times. You see a kid of eleven playing an accordion in the street-what will he become? What if he is you? The woman is dying. What if she is your sister. Photography is a mirror of yourself." Julian lives in a cement building of two rooms he threw up himself. The patio, a cement slab waiting for some next phase with no due date, looks down on the other little houses and shacks huddling on the bare hillside. Julian Cardona opens a bottle of red wine from Zacatecas. He is a quiet man, a pair of eyes that takes things in and feels no need to speak of what he sees. In his monk's room are a few books of photography with plates he studies and a simple cot. The other room is a kitchen. Out here is red wine, night and talk. He offers, "I think a photograph uncovers what is hidden and then what is hidden comes before the public eye. You must confront yourself in this mirror of reality. And the photo must seek beauty in even the worst things, it must capture the primitive things that move a human being-loneliness, hope and love. Dreams." In the mercado publico, he eats menudo amid the din of Sunday shoppers. A band of old men plays country songs. His eye drifts, the girl two tables away has fine cheekbones and the face of a child. He moves, talks, sits with her. The camera comes up and feeds. She is a teenager working in an American factory and her face shines with experiments in cosmetics. He never stops. Her name, phone number. He will visit and take yet more images. The photo will nail her in his vision of eternity. He never knew his father, and his mother left him to the care of her parents. His grandfather was a farmer who formed an ejido, a collective, after the revolution. He tried to teach Julian the earth and its animals. then Julian was in his early twenties, he faltered after working for five years in a maquiladora and with two friends decided to go back to that ejido his grandfather had founded. The peasants agreed to let him join and have ground out of respect for his grandfather. It all came to nothing. His friends fell away from the scheme, Julian fell in love with a beautiful and rich woman. So it ends this way: He gives his patch of ground to another peasant and asks that, if possible, someday the ejido build a library or clinic and name it after his grandfather because, he says, "He was like millions of farmers and animals. No one will ever know they existed and who they were." The beautiful rich woman marries someone else. Julian lives on the streets of Juárez for months. He does not explain this period except to make the point that he had it easy since he had money for food. Then he returns to the camera, the beauty. He takes that first shot: two men dressed as clowns standing one atop the other's shoulders in traffic and begging for change. The man on top juggles. The camera clicks. It is twilight, forever. He spends day after day haunting the central city, the market, the whores, the cathedral, the plaza. He is the thin, silent man, the one almost unnoticed. See him, right over there, in those shadows, that man holding a camera. These spells come and go but now he is in the midst of one. He will capture that eternity, that beauty amid the stench and dust and dirt and broken glass and painted lips on the young girls soliciting in the doorways. And finally, as always, he is broken, worn out and so he does what he must do. He goes to his aunt' s house and leaves his camera with her. The house is teeming with cousins and their wives and their children. Everyone sleeps in shifts, everyone works in the maquiladoras. This is the safe house for Julian. So he leaves the camera for two weeks. Now he can rest.
He creeps into the maquiladoras, a zone of work barred to the press except for company controlled publicity shots. Julian has learned to shoot secretly in low light and so a flow of photographs begins, men and women looking blankly at the camera with eyes chastened by a five and a half day week. They are a nation of Mexicans from the interior suddenly meeting the culture
of the machine and being broken to the habits of presses, drills and assembly lines. Julian at night leans over the tiny light table in his room and stares at the slides of the place he escaped, the dull grind he fled for the ejido, and then the streets and finally the marriage to his camera. No one wants these images. The press of Juárez is in thrall to the economic
might of the maquiladoras. The press of the United States is oblivious to the carnage just below the surface of the pat phrase, Free Trade. No matter. Julian is on his mission, and he takes his wife, the camera with him into the mills. And finds the beauty of dead end lives.