299 Image-Content of the Day 2018/12/19 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
somedays are just like that
a man behind your back in a hat
people looking in you, through
refined filtered lenses
Image circa 70’s….with a few words today.
290 Image-Content of the Day 2018/12/10 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Numero uno church in the main zacolo de ciudad de mexico. Poor Folk begging for a few pesos. The wealth of catholicism stands strong behind the gates. The way it is, hypocrisy crawls between the cracks, empty stomachs ache for jesus.
image circa 70’s, comment today, as yesterday and all bets on tomorrow.
289 Image-Content of the Day 2018/12/09 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Just before i took this shot we stood there not knowing what to say. The end was dripping from our lips, the last kiss was done and in your mind, you were already walking. That’s the way it goes sometimes, quick, just like the way some things fly into your life. I recall the beauty of the day when i saw you by the bench, the one that faces the long and narrow park, the one we sat at for the next two weeks before this night. It appeared we were falling in love until our differences emerged and spread out on the avenue like a night can do. You had your dreams laid out like a text, mine just surfaced out of impulse and they saw each other in the light of the day and freaked out. Our love was never meant to build a family around, it was not tough enough to stand alone, not true enough to create. So there we were feeling miserable for a short sweet past that was ending and a future with no spirit to be.
You shuffled in there sandwiched against the masses and wham the door squeezed shut and that was it, the last train left the station and left me stranded in the twilight just as you had found me there in a Mexico City night at some forgotten stop long ago and that was that, done, gone forever cept this last image from my crazy shutter sped finger tips.
Image circa 77 Mexico City – writing yesterday
288 Image-Content of the Day 2018/12/08 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
In the early part of the century i made my living as a photographer on a tour boat in Xochimilco just on the south side of Mexico City. People called me Jose but my name was really Fernandez and i lived the life of a photo-specialist. Having the eye of an artist was just the beginning. In those days you had to know the science of lenses, the chemistry of film and developers and the physics of light. You had to be a mechanic of sorts to deal with all the apparatus and a carpenter and painter for sets, let alone a marketing genius and promotion manager just to stay in the business. I loved my work and photographed some of the many celebrities that visited the City from all over the globe. Up and down the canals of one of the most scenic places near the city. Flowers and vegetation showered the days with beauty and my life was in love with me. Things changed when 35mm cameras came into vogue and more and more people took their own images and the competition made the game much more challenging. I managed, i had a talent for staying in the game, i survived, lived a long life and have images in a few of the museums spread across the city. I died decades of years ago now and with the advent of digital modernism in all forms of media in the hands of the many, i survive only in the minds of a few surrealists and history buffs. This wandering 35mm gringo caught me doing my thing way before his time and he’s probably close to the final curtain himself if not already gone.
We shared a smile before our boats parted up and down the canal and that was that.
Image circa early 70’s – writing yesterday
287 Image-Content of the Day 2018/12/07 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Strange the way waking-dreams weave in an out of mind. Troubled in the doorway of change, the delicate undertaker slips in to mind.
I swung in from the other side, just in time to see him leave for the top. They saw you trapped within your love but making it big on the social stage and that was good enough for you and you had already lost your honour towards the hard path, anyways. Meantime big business was buying up every green field of passion from here to the edge of the do-gooder horizon and you got sucked right in. When you thought you saw me there struggling in the forefront of humanity, you were mistaken, i wasn’t
struggling, i was breathing deep just before the night hit. I didn’t expect to turn in your heart or your expression on your delicate face when you saw me bend down to wash the feet of an unknown soul. What else could i do, the waves were pouring in, the crash was close and the immense pressure to surrender was overwhelming, i had no choice really and i’m glad the road turned and twisted into the dead end it is. How else could it have turned into this soft shadow slipping down the tears of your face? You, it seems were meant to be a star, it’s all over the media now, without much of a message, and without so much as a credit or a byline for the mysterious undertaker.
I stood there just on the verge when things changed and headed back from whence it came, the other side, leaving but with a few thoughts to get you through too.
Image circa late 70’s – writing yesterday
280 Image-Content of the Day 2018/11/30 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
One must walk out on your own, carry your own load. Days’ll be tough, roads long but no ones gonna do it for ya. There’s always another day to work your magic till there’s not. There is always someone carrying a heavier load than yours so help them on their way. There will always be the ones that will criticize any attempt you make in being real, in being simple and honest. Jealousy is inherent in us all to different degrees but yet we continue to ‘point’ with every finger we have to our hearts content and then some. Social media is encouraging the destruction of humanity but there is more to it than that. You’re destroying this earth, this world, you and all your fucking constant manipulations and deceit to ramming your belief systems no matter what they are down the throats of others. You just can’t conceive of a world where everyone accepts that we don’t really know anything for certain and that for centuries you have been played the fool, it has all been fabricated, manufactured, formulated to control this and that, you and them for money and power. That is the simple explanation and of course your mind now is screaming with every breath with just the possibility in knowing that your mind may be totally fucking wrong. And who in the hell am i to suggest this. Well i’m just a guy who has gone to the edge so many times and been up and down so many trails and talked to gods and devils to the trees the waters and all has lead me to a love that thought can not know. The truth is unknowable in this way. You can not bring truth back from the heavens with your mind but you can tell fantastic stories and some of these tales may help others with their burdens, their carts of conclusions and definite abstracts but they must eventually crumble to live free, real and as the super humans we are being drawn towards to be, possibly.
It is all too scary for most so we cling onto the secure cluster of thoughts we call our sacred greed with our god, our creator, our ideals, our science, institutions and authority. Possibly that used to work in a society geographically separated but in this unified world where numerous earth species and human extinction is very real and on our front door step, it is just not acceptable any longer. We all have to question the validity of our very minds and what we with its’ tool of thought ‘reason’ can really be known and what, if anything, can we all believe together as one race, one people. Our beliefs are killing each other, the world and the scared love we all so desperately want to believe exists.
We continue to pull our wagons of truth carry our loads of beliefs thru the streets and avenues hoping to arrive somewhere for good, forever but where do we end up but back here, right back here on the back porch of discontent with an eager uncertain smile beaming out through our front door……….
Possibly the only answer is for…………another day; (brave ventures into the unknown crevices of the mind; psychedelics, isolation tanks, sweats, vision quests, whatever dissolves the ego whereas real truth and love may hold you for a moment or two)
What can i say, my self is on the line, bending, changing with every image.
Image circa 1977, writing yesterday
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Mexico | DSC_0118.tif
Patrick Wey
278 Image-Content of the Day 2018/11/28 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
There is so much more that could be said. You think you can get away with a few trips into your head as if time was constant and to be resolved. You are attached to everything, the furthest star is your neighbour the smallest spec a long wave. Every theory you attempted to own, owned you in the end. There was no end, there is no end. A few years ago you were sitting as you are but in a desert night with a cactus as your guide and visions of patterned chaos in control of everything. The jesus you knew transformed into a few creatures before your eyes, and did tricks for you, the dream in a dream of a dream took you beyond yourself. You found no self. You belong to no one. What you thought was real melted into the desert sands. A medicine man appeared from the fire, sang you into a scene, took you places you’ll never remember, taught you to realize nothing really matters but everything has a consequence. Laws evolve, everything is a reflection. Freedom drives consciousness into itself but reason will always be a weak truth.
As i sat there inside of you, i could feel your discomfort with the way things are. You were hoping for things to follow but they didn’t, just when you thought you had it together things changed. These are simply words crashing into one another attempting a dialogue with themselves. They can not go any further than the edge of mind. The vast space is thoughtless and demands you leave yourself at the gate but there is no barrier.
It was a hot day on the Zocalo, i had a few moments alone before my life was to return. I sat there letting the mind go as it did. It is strange how a simple glimpse can take you so far. Who would have ever suspected how vast the mind can travel in a few flashes of our time. Who could have known what had been implanted as i had pondered here in meditation. You, me, future, past,, interwoven for a flash.
circa the Main Zocalo Mexico City 1977 – literature yesterday.
277 Image-Content of the Day 2018/11/27 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Image circa 1977 Mexico City
274 Image-Content of the Day 2018/11/24 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Some say I’m negative, my words depressing. So what. Those are usually the ones that want it all sweet and certain. I use to care but that was yesterday. I don’t attempt to find the negative in this world it just presents itself, there’s plenty of it to go around but that doesn’t depress me and if it does you, well what can i say, put another pretty picture on your wall, i’ve got thousands of um for the right price. You see, i need um too.
I didn’t travel down these roads to get anything in particular, and if i found some good fortune along the trail it was because i stuck to the path, stayed focused on the mission at hand, but most of the time i didn’t evaluate life in those terms. I just wiped any past off as best i could and kept walking. No, it never disappeared completely, death’ll do that but it did allow for a new breeze to blow against this mind while i rambled on.
I don’t have much use for the superficial shit that floats around but i accept it the best i can and no doubt, i have contributed my own fare share. I ain’t no saint and i never said i was and if you think i implied a ‘holier than thou’ attitude, well you’ve been mistaken, i’m just a guy that was looking for something that it appears no one has ever found and i see now, no one ever will. Most lie and want you to believe what they believe, but it’s all made up, a fantasy, a dream. So when i see most people wandering down a similar terrain expecting it all for nothing, no hardship, no desert nights alone with nothing but you and you and you. Well sometimes it makes me laugh and others times it just makes me sick. A lack of compassion some do say, a lack of this or a little of that, whatever, hit the road jack and that does it for me, i’m gone. As i said, i don’t care, shove your face-look social praise where the sun don’t shine. There ain’t anyone i have to please but if a few find my words resemble some thoughts roaming around in their own questioning brains, well then that’s great, reassuring of sorts, but it doesn’t change a thing, just feels a little less lonely in here, i suppose.
The curtain falls and i can feel the next scene supposing itself just beyond some dream on another slippery edge of time. So i better move on, so as to catch the next glimpse of light, when it shows up.
Image circa 1977 but it could have been tomorrow.
273 Image-Content of the Day 2018/11/23 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Is there anybody listening asked the traveler? Is there any room left on the walls for a little piece of me? You see i’m just like you, i need a name to capture my thoughts upon too. Something to die for, something to hang on to, something to let go of. The hills in the distance are too far, the beach is too hot, the streets too slow for dreaming. A simple breeze skims thru the palms, some birds fly by inside a blue sky. There is so much more somewhere, so many things i could have done, could have been. Here i am mellow and belonging to no-one. A few dreams float by and i catch a glimpse. I let them go, there are others they can catch, still in need of purpose. I am content to hold nothing. I am a simple vessel, one that lives for nothing, cares when i care and one whom holds no ideal to dear.
They appear out of nowhere just in the nick of time, the little ones, the bright ones. When you least expect it, love covers you. Love so free and yet it costs so much. All your dreams, all your conclusions crash away when the waters of mystery sails upon your soul.
Image circa 1976 – writing yesterday
272 Image-Content of the Day 2018/11/22 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
In the early morning mist stuffing newspapers for a few bucks on the way to the top. You got your dreams and i got mine we’re just different fantasies caught in time. This day is long gone and the news faded into the streets like dying dreams do, into peoples lives, into their souls, into the cracks of their bedroom walls.
It’s hard to imagine just what happened here. Where were they goin when the ads got sandwiched into the rag, when their job was done, where did they end up from the heat and the heart of the metropolis?
The city was barely awake, the all night people were crawling home, traffic polite and sparse, the silent folk were scraping their thoughts together and the avenues rolled into the dawn with a grateful smile while the steady hum of machine slowly wound its routine louder and further along the tar. Alive again, another day with the news headed for the masses, little written words jammed into packets of meaning to get them through the day.
The daily news so yesterday and so over done. The love of life for a few cents and a glass of time. This is life in the city; clean, straight, forward, entertaining on a good day.
Image circa 1977 Mexico City
271 Image-Content of the Day 2018/11/21 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Nice to be back in a land where people greet you in the streets. Where there isn’t the typical western paranoia. They are hesitant sometimes unsure of what type of a gringo you might be. Many gringos don’t even look at you so it is obvious why many Mexicans are hesitant to give you their tradition. They feel the vibes, the arrogance, the useless conclusions swimming around northern brains. The age old ‘better than thou’ attitude lingers on like a fool in a sinking trade.
In this town you can still go to the zacalo (town square) on most evenings especially Saturdays and see families, neighbours, young and old intermingle. The whole cross section of the town connects in this square. This is their life, their way, a slow pace long forgotten in the north of the americas.
It is all not so romantic. There is the noice, a different attitude here concerning music everywhere. At least most of it is Mexican style country rather than the pounding drums of rap, bad rock, hip hop and what have you. Accordion, stand up base, acoustic guitar and that’s it, simple and softer.
For the most part you can usually escape the traditional chatter once you find a few hideaways along well worn cobble stone roads with small tiendas and local restaurants of real foods and mothers and daughters holding hands as they stroll thru the evening air. Old men sitting in old broken structures that resemble chairs and kids playing with amigos and genuine waves of love floating around their poverty.
It’s a soft life here….most of the time.
These quaint places are diminishing as more and more western traits capture the youth with the frills of a more modern life. It is a western trend to travel the world these days or you’re a nobody which is another aspect destroying the simple life.
In the end it is mostly your own choice if you want the glamour, the gold, a simple love or the complexities of the modern man.
I can’t do justice to the beauty and the destruction here so i best leave this gentle night to the roosters in the distance and dogs singing their bark.
Image circa 1977
270 Image-Content of the Day 2018/11/20 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
I don’t know what it all could possibly mean. What reasons are there for the way things are? What matters in the end? What matters in the beginning? What matters in-between? Does anything have to matter or do we just want it that way?
How long do i have to carry this burden? How did it ever get to be this way? How long do i have to be persecuted?
Will they ever learn? Who staged this scenario? Whom is to blame? What certainty do i have to offer? How long will they honour these dreams? It can’t go on forever. I came in and i’m bound to go out. Thought can not get back in behind the gates of eden, it can’t even crawl there. They are doomed to want what they can’t get; to be certain of the uncertain, to dream their lives away.
Reality is just something to be proud about but it doesn’t exist for long.
I suppose i’ll carry this mess for awhile longer, but even illusions become unbearable and have to die.
Image circa 1977
269 Image-Content of the Day 2018/11/19 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
She looked straight at me. She knew. She didn’t look thru me. She was calm with what she saw. Her world was understood in a mysterious way. She didn’t need to know what would happen next. She could deal with change like it was a natural thing to do. She didn’t think about all this. Her thoughts were simple and moved along without the burden of a tough dream. She was too young to have been conditioned too strong but the youth in her mind was also of her. A strong young child with a woman in her eyes.
You would think she was looking away, a reflection set on going in a different direction, a parallel dream captured by accident.
This is the way it was, one lens, one frame.
She was moving to the other side with her mind. Her eyes saw something out of view. It’s anybodies guess where things were going or ended up. She could be a fifty year old doctor in Venezuela or a wife with three children on the outskirts of the City, or a drug addict in Pensilvania. She could be a lot of things. We don’t know.
Images can do that to your soul. Take you places that don’t exist. Give you a reason to live, an understanding that makes sense. Old photographs have a way of traveling thru your mind like a movie mostly fiction with just enough reality to make it real.
Image circa 1977
268 Image-Content of the Day 2018/11/18 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Man loaded down with bags of hope, buckets of paint for colouring his walls and worn out shoes from long walks through-out the lowlands. Man carries his struggle with a bent back and weary eyes. He knows there’s light at the end of the tunnel, he’s been told so for so many years, it’s written in the scriptures, prophesies have inscribed truth in visions upon his brain. Man has a purpose upon the stairway to heaven, songs have been written in gold, guitar licks have been immortalized.
The sun is sailing west, the crimson flames are wavering in the breeze across the horizons of the seas. I’m a man here from the archives stretching along the avenues, bent around the bends towards a promised paradise. I’m here free chained to the genetics of the future, strolling along the beach in a holiday.
Mexico, the ancient land of remote civilizations sprouting out of the sands along this prehistoric shore. I love this place, it’s magic for the stranded man inside.
Image circa 1977
267 Image-Content of the Day 2018/11/17 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
When you’re a street photographer you have to take some chances. Not everyone wants their photograph taken and you don’t always know that until the shutter has clicked. I have been in a few situations where i was lucky to get out unbeaten. That’s the nature of the career. Today is totally different with so many snapping images from their phones or their larger cameras which makes it easier on the one hand and less unique on the other. This man was not happy about my decision to capture him for some of his own reasons. He’d be gone by now. His story is not known. A broken wrist, an injured arm. Someone knows about him somewhere. We fade into the dust, no matter who we are. Some believe in various shades of afterworlds but those are all theories no matter how much evidence you want to state as proof. Me, it doesn’t really matter what i believe about all that. There is only one thing i could say that might be absolutely certain and that is that it is all ultimately a mystery and there ain’t anything for certain. But as far as certainty goes there are numerous conclusions necessary to get us by for our daily bread. I’m certain i took this picture, i remember that moment and the eerie feeling i got with this look that pierced my soul. Somehow this moment is encoded, somehow but no doubt it is shifting, rearranging the moment, moving into the dust of time also. Life is a paradox, or is it?
Image circa 1977
266 Image-Content of the Day 2018/11/16 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
The main zocalo square in Mexico City. You can see the historic cathedral in the background where Pope John visited and in fact i managed to photograph him as he passed by in his open vehicle carriage along with shots of the event itself, the people, the frenzy, in that following year. There was always a crazy number of volks-wagon bugs on the smog scented tar of the city streets. I felt quite comfortable in the excitement of the noice and architecture, painted in sounds of spanish floating about. I was young, full of adventure and inquisitive about everything. I carried camera gear wherever i went and felt obligated to document anything i could. I am not sure why, some passion rising up from the heart into the brain and once the mind caught a glimpse of what it could do, i was hooked, had to capture every move this world made. Nothing stood in my way, i would have gone anywhere. I tried to get work for Vogue, Time, National Geographic and would have gotten work for Vogue if i had stayed in Mexico, even National Geographic liked my portfolio especially shots i got of a staging of the crucifixion of Jesus in some little out of the way mountain town later on that year. Definitely there were opportunities in Mexico that i would never have gotten in NYC and believe me, because i tried. The competition was staggering and it is even worse today, i am sure.
I traveled in and out of the neighbourhoods of the city, across the land, the desert, the coast and fell in love with that spanish tainted country. I got a job teaching english downtown in a large institution and smelt the aroma of the cities air for a year.
I married a señorita, not for marriage but to get her into canada, though i thought we’d make a good couple i never conformed to the institution for any confirmation for anything. I don’t need some institution to determine whether i am married or not. I adopted the anti-establishment with a firm understanding of its hypocrisy years before and i wasn’t about to change my stance then or now, for the most part. Rosa is still a close friend and lives in canada but we dismantled the bed years ago.
It takes a certain talent to be a good street photographer, these were my early years, testing the tension of the people on the streets, seeing what i could do, building my love for the many faceted aspects of becoming a photographer, a label, an artist possibly, a writer maybe. That was then.
Image circa 76 or 77
222 Image-Content of the Day 2018/10/03 of-by patrick wey https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
i don’t wanna beg, i did’t plan it this way, i don’t like being here any more than you would. i see your fancy stuff hangin off your back, your future rapped up in a velvet cloth, your whole universe summed up and placed rather straight on down the line. i’m no idiot, just a chick with some hard turns, a woman in this world displayed like an antique in a second hand store. the day passes slow here, some days are real tough, some days fall off the edge, some are full of pity and sadness. i didn’t plan it this way but i’m caught, no way to get out of this mess. I’ve got kids dead half dead and some never lived at all. It’s not easy watchin you with your things. It’s not right, you know it and i know it. i got no dreams left, nothin left here but death watchin. this has not been a good day and i can’t find it in my heart to apologize, leave what you will, look the other way.
photo circa 70’s writing yesterday
119 Image-Content of the Day 2018/06/22 of-by https://blog.patrickwey.com/category/image-content-of-the-day
Travelling back to my apartment in Mexico city from Fortin De La Flores, a small town a couple hundred kilometres east of the city where the family of my wife to be Rosa lived. At one point along the windy road i encountered traffic backed up for miles but eventually managed to get close to this sad event of a train wreck. This is one of the many photographs that emerged. The news was all over the front page of the Mexico City newspaper the next day. I believe two engines collided head on and numerous people had died. Living in the big city of 30 million was an extraordinary experience filled with adventure every minute. Dangerous and pleasant moments existed close by as with the extreme poor living beside the privileged rich, sometimes technologies and situations were held together with coat hangers, literally. Sometimes it would do the job, sometimes it didn’t. Not to imply this was the case here.
If i would have submitted this image they would have used it; their photograph was well after the smoke had lifted, silent and still. Another opportunity missed in my estranged career. Circa 1976 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort%C3%ADn_de_las_Flores
