In the two-month-long flurry of activity that lead me to Buenos Aires, I don’t think I ever made the time to actually build expectations of what the city would be like. For a while I got into the bad habit of querying Flickr for any city I was planning, or hoping to visit. Want to imagine what Buenos Aires will be like? Just search Flickr for “Buenos Aires” or any major city and in the search results you get a neatly packaged photo tour. Organize those results by date and you will probably even get photos as recent as last week, or possibly even last night. Webcams be damned - if you want real insight into the eyes of a particular geography, Flickr provides an experience vastly richer than a grainy, static overlook. It can provide last weeks general mood of a bar near the hostel you were thinking of staying at, or the light level around noon in a plaza you wanted to visit. Rich, rich, rich, almost too rich. I’ve had moments where I visit places I’ve previously searched on Flickr and rather than surprise or a new experience I am faced with a kind of watered-down deja vu. It’s an awful feeling. One Christmas when I was 10 I snuck all my gifts down to the basement and used a razor blade to slice open the tape, extract my gifts, and then insert them back into the same packages. I had my own private Christmas a week ahead of time and when I actually had to open my gifts in front of my family I forced myself to act surprised. Not knowing the subtleties involved in such a sham, I oversold the whole performance. I acted really fucking surprised.
That’s a lame story, but the point is that you can be too eager and ruin an experience satisfying a curiosity - and so I try not to. And in Buenos Aires, I definitely haven’t. In fact, I have no clue where to even start with the observations I’ve had that you could never in a million years observe on Flickr, or any photo album - social, shared, public, private, etc. Regardless of the everyday, common and accepted usage of digital cameras there will always be images that can never be captured properly: the rampant dog shit, garbage men sneaking in a half-ass job in a littered city, the act of poetry in “Te Amo” graffiti, foreigner shock, blonde Argentine elegance and wealth, the happy sag of stray animal tongue - things too visceral, personal, minute, fragile. Maybe I’m just not a skilled photographer.
I’ve had a lot of thinking time here, but like the labyrinth narratives of native writer Borges, its tumultuous - new events and thoughts replace the old before distinct connections are made. It’s possible that I just need time to acclimate, to collect my thoughts, but I almost believe that this certain kind of psyche pervades those who try to penetrate or have spent too much time with the psychology of this city. It’s a smart city, a thinking city, but it’s also a passionate, proud city. It’s serious, sensual, home of the Tango. The thieves are clever. The people are beautiful. I’m not saying about Buenos Aires that hasn’t been said.
I need to learn how to take better pictures.
