Fire from Heaven: a book of photographs by John Sevigny
When I sat down to compile and design Fire from Heaven, my third publication of photographs, I wanted to make a book that looked nothing like 2017’s Hymnal.
Hymnal was a collection of color portraits of people I’d known who’d died or gone to prison. Fire from Heaven would be two things. First, I wanted to look back at what I’d done with black-and-white photographs since I’d taken up the craft with seriousness in 1998. Second, I wanted a selection of new work from Mexico City’s Plaza Garibaldi and the surrounding area. Fire from Heaven includes images shot on film, before film went the way of the dinosaur then came back again.
The photographs in Fire from Heaven were taken between 2005 and 2019 in Mexico, and also, Guatemala.
Despite it’s two-pronged approach, the book is surprisingly cohesive and links what I did in January 2019 with my first project, Ladies’ Bar, published at Luminous Lint in 2007. That set of pictures was shot on film. Fire from Heaven includes other frames made when I still wasn’t sure what Ladies’ Bar was about — pictures that have never been published or exhibited before.
Going back to Ladies’ Bar and the 10 months between 2006 and 2007 when I was working on it, what was it? A collection of portraits of people in old-school-style Mexican cantinas, as I’d originally intended? No. It became about women who work as prostitutes in Guadalajara’s San Juan de Dios neighborhood, at that time infested with thieves, and crack addicts. Women, particularly in Latin America, face a rough reality. The nightmare of femicides in Juarez was still unfolding, and in a dozen other places, still is. That’s why I made Ladies’ Bar and that’s why there are seven photographs of women in Fire from Heaven.
Other factors make this project unique.
As some of you know I designed and printed Fire from Heaven just a month after I was kidnapped and tortured by a drug cartel in Veracruz, Mexico.
Thank the gods and goddesses for family and friends.
My brother and his partner generously let me stay at their home in the States for more than six weeks. Before making the decision to fly north, I’d spent two weeks in a Mexico City hotel room trying to recover from physical injuries and encroaching depression. I thought the process would be fast. I did not know I had a broken eye socket, three broken ribs and dozens of microfractures on my head. Eventually I realized I had to get out of Dodge, get to a serious doctor and real safety. My brother never blinked when I asked if I could stay with him. Mom got me out of Mexico.
Fire from Heaven is not about kidnapping. The pictures in the book were taken before it happened. But as I pulled it together, I screened calls and messages from reporters, Mexican and US law enforcement officials, and several intelligence in three countries officers (when you take any matter to a US embassy, it tends to escalate quickly). I slept through nightmares, was woken up by others, and wrote endless messages about what was troubling me to my friend, poet Steve Pottinger, who provided an ear, and a ton of badly needed psychological advice from day one. Only one US news organization, Fox, covered it (and believe it or not, they did a great job). But the story, with varying degrees of accuracy, appeared in at least 58 Mexican papers, was discussed on the radio and on television in that country.
Some of the pictures are, in fact, happy. Few, if any, have anything to do with organized crime.
A man in a Pachuco suit strums a guitar inside a famous pulqueria — a place where pulque, a traditional Aztec drink, is bought and sold. Another man, after a difficult day of work, pushes a hot dog cart along Eje Central Lazaro Cardenas the boulevard that fronts Plaza Garibaldi.
Older pictures from Guadalajara’s Colonia San Juan de Dios remind me of how similar the two areas are and how little the spirit of my work has changed over so many years.
A prostitute with a tattoo of la Santisima Muerte on her thigh sits in a plastic deck chair in a dark bar in 2006. An elderly woman working as a prostitute who told me she was forced to work in that trade as a child after her sister ran away to escape the same fate, poses, arm over her head, echoing the gesture of the young woman in the Hefner-style poster on the wall behind her. In another picture, a man at a Guadalajara dive called La Tenampa — named after a legendary, century-old nightspot at Plaza Garibaldi — leans on a bar and looks out into space, a pair of Indio-brand beers next to him.
That photograph and several others in Fire From Heaven were shot with a rudimentary Olympus XA on Tri-X film. That little rangefinder-style camera was my sidearm before press work and a lack of decent labs in Mexico forced me to embrace digital photography.
I don’t work that way much, anymore. And after everything that’s happened, I confess I’m trying to re-learn how to work at all. I do take pictures. I’m not sure what I want those pictures “to do.” I work every day. But I have no clear objective. I will have one soon enough because I have learned that in art, you can play the long game or you can become an accountant. At the moment, I’m still rattled and raw from trauma inflicted less than four months ago.
I see my life as divided into two periods — one before I was kidnapped, another after. For what it’s worth Fire from Heaven is a watershed book that marks, almost exactly, the moment when the first part ended and the second began. A boxing trainer I knew recently told me that a professional only becomes what he or she says he is after facing adversity. He said that in his opinion, Tyson’s career ended at 0–5. All of Tyson’s fights before he faced Buster Douglas, he said, were mere showcases. He told me to see what had happened as an opportunity: I could either fold or become a true photographer.
“Anyway,” he added, “everyone hates people who don’t seem to have paid their dues. I don’t think many will suggest you haven’t paid your dues after what happened to you down there.”
I hope you’ll order a copy of Fire from Heaven and enjoy the photographs it contains as much as I enjoyed taking them.
John Sevigny, Guatemala, 2019
