•Written by The Editors• ••Sunday•, 09 •November• 2008 22:11•
Artists often fall into their professions unintentionally, and occasionally against their will. They become creative because no other option is left open to them. Samuel Rodriguez was studying education when he first went to Palestine in 1999 as a volunteer with an NGO working with children. “It was my first trip away from Europe,” he recalls,”and I met a reality that was very different from mine. I had the feeling that I needed to take photographs of what I was seeing.”
Rodriguez soon returned to school, but found that all he could only think about was photography. A short course on photojournalism in Barcelona sealed his fate in 2004. The course led him to Lebanon where he photographed the Shatila refugee camp. From there he went to Morocco to cover an earthquake, which led him to an exhibition in Barcelona.
In 2007, he was back in Lebanon tracing the aftermath of the Israeli invasion and photographing the gruesome effects of the massive use of cluster bombs on civilians. Then he spent two months photographing inside Lebanon’s Badawi refugee camp. When asked to take some pictures of refugee families who had been crowded into a small space, He said, “I can’t. They are not cattle and I am not a Mafia photographer.” After a few days, when he knew the people better as individuals, he could start working.
“When I first saw the refugee camp, I was shocked,” he says. “I wanted to know more and more, but each time I felt that I knew less. I never get tired of going to Beirut, because each time I go there it is totally different.”
But in the end, it is really the universal human experience that interests him. “I need to have people in my photographs,”Rodriguez explains. “For me it is not just the face, it is what is happening to the person that makes it interesting. “
When he went back to Spain, he found it difficult to communicate. “For a month and a half, I didn’t talk to anyone. I left my photographs in the computer without looking at them. I felt that no one was interested. I asked myself, ‘Now what?’”
Then a newspaper assigned him to do a photo essay on workers who had contracted cancer. Frustrated at trying to illustrate the full extent of the internal damage that had been wrought on the bodies of the workers, he placed X ray plates of each worker’s internal damage next to a portrait of the worker’s face.
Ironically, Rodriguez thought about abandoning photo-journalism because of the difficulty in earning a living. He thought he might teach. But he finally he gave up and returned to photography. “The magic is in stopping a moment,” he says. “It is like a time machine. When I see photographs from the last century, I feel that I am in that moment. It is magic.”
Samuel Rodriguez recently took part as a photojournalism fellow in two 'global issues' workshops organized by the Geneva-based Media21 Global Journalist Network. As part of that project he made photographic trips to both Haiti and Beirut and was awarded an international prize [Click here to see the photograph]
[Click here to see an online slide show of Samuel Rodriguez's work]
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Una abraçada!
Juli