v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Paris 2007

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Business Trip to Paris

The Worst Image Ever

 

I'm not sure why Trump wanted this foto taken and distributed-its like a murder taking a shot of the scene of the crime in all its gory details. In this shot you can peer into the vapid center of this evil man. From The Cut:

abies make excellent political props — so useful for a quick kiss and cuddle during campaign stops, instant humanizers of even the stiffest politicians. But the Trumps are different. We rarely see them with babies. They are the least “familial” First Family in our lifetimes, despite (or perhaps because of) having created the most family-centered, nepotistic, mob-dynasty-style administration in history. We detect no family warmth from this president (save his unsettling attachment to Ivanka). No spousal affection. But also so little acknowledgment of any of his other children, of the fact of being a father (and grandfather) at all. Where is Barron, for example? We never see him or receive even the most anodyne updates about him — his progress in school, his favorite sports team. Where are the grandkids? Nothing. And certainly, Melania is the least publicly maternal First Lady we’ve ever had. She doesn’t even pretend to care.

No, in Trumpville, the emotional texture and familial feeling usually modeled by a First Family has been replaced with the enthusiasm of anonymous crowds, with the mass hysteria whipped up at Nuremberg-style rallies led by the President, where people seek the thrill of connection conjured by ritualistic chants of racism and misogyny (“Lock her up!” “Build that wall!” “Send them back!”). Donald Trump seems to experience love only in such soulless settings, with their underlying threat of violence — and he encourages his followers to do the same.

Those fascistic ceremonies lie at the root of the El Paso massacre, and that’s what makes this photo especially galling. Motherless Baby Paul is the latest victim of the hatred those rallies gin up. For Trump then to create uncharacteristically this faux portrait of familial love, to play-act a kind of happy Daddy, Mommy, and Baby — by borrowing THIS baby — is an abomination. In this simulacrum of a family portrait, the centerpiece is a direct evocation of the massacre that rendered him available for “adoption” in this photo in the first place. And since the picture blithely replaces the baby’s slaughtered parents — murdered for the family’s Latinx ethnicity — with two unconcerned, smiling white people, it performs a kind of symbolic kidnapping, cruelly appropriating someone else’s child for personal gain. (Note also the marginalized positions of the two Anchondo relatives.)

The abuse and kidnapping of children of color are recurrent themes in this administration. Consider the children of the 680 Mississippi food workers cruelly arrested this week, who returned from their first day at school to find their parents vanished. They are the victims of child abuse, if not outright psychological torture. Ditto for the many children who lost parents and other relatives in three, largely racially inflected gun massacres in the past two weeks. Not to mention the children who were themselves killed in those shootings (including a 6-year-old Latino boy in Gilroy, CA). As for the thousands of migrant children ripped from their parents’ arms and held in subhuman, lethal conditions (with no plans in place for family reunification) they are unmistakably the victims of ongoing mass-scale, state-sponsored de facto kidnapping.

There is, furthermore, strong evidence that some of those migrant children have now been forcibly adopted out to white American families via “Bethany Christian Services,” an anti-choice adoption agency known for its coercive practices and run by Brian DeVos, a cousin-by-marriage of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. This amounts to kidnapping on top of kidnapping — and probably represents the end of any hope that these children might ever reunite with their own families.

All of these ghastly truths make themselves felt in this single photo of the vacuous and smug Trumps masquerading as kindly hospital visitors, seeking to comfort the El Paso survivors. Posing for this photograph, the Trumps remove any last doubt about their dead-eyed cruelty and transactional view of life. Smiling emptily above this wounded little boy, whose life was shattered before he could take his first step, the president and his wife call to mind those famous safari photos taken by Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr. — in which they, like their father, smile brightly over the victims of their own heedless cruelty and violence. To Donald Trump, this baby is little more than a hunting trophy in his own brutal race war (which explains his triumphant thumbs up).

Protest For Puerto Rico

Here are some fotos from this Monday's protest to get the Puerto Rican Gorvernor, Ricky Rosello, to resign. His incompetence and corruption have worsened and already difficult situation on the island. There have been massive protests on the island and the hope and expectation is that he will resign and things will change for the better.

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- Protesta en Washington DC

2013 with Macksey

Vallejo Nocturno 2013-In Macksey's Library

Ricky Renuncia DC Protest

All fotos by Vallejo Nocturno 2019- DC Protest of Puerto Rico's Corrupt Governor to Implore Him to Resign

The Dream of Unifying Images

Albert Kahn, the French Banker from the turn of last century, decided to photograph the world:

When Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and philanthropist, decided he wanted to commission a photographic “archive of the planet” he wasn’t joking. And though the idea of cataloging the earth seems whimsical in scope today, the pictures he helped create between 1909 and 1931 hold our attention like few others from the era.

They are some of the finest examples of early color pictures made using the Lumière brothers’ innovative Autochrome process. Autochromes employed microscopic grains of dyed potato starch to filter the color spectrum into three additive shades. The results, when viewed through a stereoscope or back-lit by a light box, were among the first natural color images in that their tones were derived from the color spectrum of light and not the artist’s hand.

In all, Kahn’s team of cameramen visited fifty countries to collect 72,000 photographs, some of which are among the first color images ever made in places like Vietnam, Brazil, Norway, and Mongolia. But with its essentialized worldview, Archives of the Planet also laid groundwork for the kind of exotic voyeurism made ubiquitous by publishers like National Geographic.

Nonetheless, the images Kahn was instrumental in producing retain a sense of idealism which is hard to ignore—their unnervingly contemporary feel a projection of a distinct color palette clashing with the unselfconscious postures of another era.

Kahn’s ambitions were cut short in the 1930s when he lost his fortunes to the Great Depression. But for a brief period he had hoped to promote peace and cultural solidarity through photography—a sentiment to which the medium has returned frequently, if unconvincingly, ever since.

Pierre Molinier Auto Portrait

Pierre Molinier's Auto Portrait

Photographer Ken Van Sickle PBS Short

A great photographer who spent most of his 80 years unknown until very recently.

Todd Marcus Orchestra

Last Friday through Monday i had the opportunity to track Todd's talented orchestra between Baltimore and DC documenting this groups big band work on Todd's compositions.It was really enjoyable to take photographs and listen to exceptional jazz at the same time.

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Todd Marcus Orchestra

Infrared in Peru

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- In Lima's San Isidro district looking down into the Pacific