Hymnal
Stories behind three photographs
My magazine Hymnal, a 16-page collection of color photographs taken over the past few years in Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, is currently on sale. Because it contains almost no words, I wanted to write something about it for people who have bought it, or might want to do so.
Hymnal was conceived as a booklet of photographic prayers for people whose portraits it contains. Some of those people have tragic backstories.
The idea of pictures as hymns, which are prayers we sing, came from two people. One was fellow Caribbean Derek Walcott who has said poetry is an extension of prayer. Second was a nun in Florida who told me candles, songs, or anything else can serve as gestures or requests to God.
Several people in this magazine died violent deaths and some are in prison. One was pregnant with her second child and locked up for life when we went to press. I’m not a person who prays much. I take pictures. But even if you’re not a believer, prayer makes sense: We need to believe someone — a god or a human being — is rooting for us. Not knowing if it’s true but praying anyway is faith. I may not be religious but I have faith in human divinity and the interconnectedness of souls. I decided to use photos as hymns to those who need them, on the streets, in prisons, or where we go when we die.
I left these stories out of Hymnal. I worried too much information might put contextual fences around images. I prefer to let viewers to sort them out themselves. But these words, longer than anecdotes and shorter than biographies, should exist somewhere. People want to know the stories behind pictures. Here are stories about three people in Hymnal, isolated from the printed photographs.
From Nicaragua to El Salvador; from brothel to prison
The 20-year-old woman above worked as a prostitute at a drug house and bar where I used to spend a lot of time. There, I took thousands of pictures and spent hours talking to dudes from the the Barrio 18 gang. They were de facto security guards, paid assassins and drug couriers for the lady who ran the place. I hate using fake names so I’ll call her “my friend” because I knew her for years.
The night I took this picture I’d stayed too late. Walking the streets of San Salvador, murder capital of the world, would have been unwise. I ended up sitting on the floor in the tiny room where my friend slept and worked. She told me about growing up in Nicaragua before traffickers brought her to San Salvador.
It was a litany of hard luck and poor choices.
She said the state had taken her away from her parents at five years old, but didn’t say why. From the time she was six until she was 18 she lived at an orphanage in Managua. When my friend was a legal adult she returned to live with her parents. It wasn’t long, she said, before her father raped her. That episode set her fleeing on a path that ended in that room, that night. The same path led into a dark, uncertain future. She cried as she talked. Daring to be a bit voyeuristic, I asked her not to move and snapped this picture. Her defiance to the camera is a remarkable reflection of who she is. I have always believed my friend would survive any misfortune that would come her way. Cornered, she reacts like an animal and shows no fear. She runs with gangs that make the MS-13 look like Boy Scouts. As she told it, her life was a dirty grind through long days and longer nights.
Last time I saw my friend was at a different gang run bar in another part of town (a night on the town with me can be colorful). She was so drunk, loud and borderline violent that guards dragged her outside and told her not to come back. Imagine how rambunctious you have to be to get tossed from a Salvadoran gang bar. I watched her climb into a car with four men and I haven’t seen her since.
I later ran into a Barrio 18 member in a different country who I’d known in El Salvador. He said my friend was pregnant with a second child and serving 60 years in prison on drug charges. Later, another member of Barrio 18 said someone had paid a judge off to have her released. I have no idea what the truth is, nor do I know if the story she told me about her life is true. The world I work in is a wilderness of mirrors, a symphony of whispered hearsay and a labyrinth of lies. But most of what people tell me turns out to be true.
Murder mystery
I don’t know everyone who appears in Hymnal. I doubt I exchanged five words with the street evangelist on the cover. Nor did I know the woman above, murdered weeks after I photographed her.
But this picture haunts me and provokes more questions than others.
I was walking in San Salvador when I passed Mercado Sagrado Corazon. Next to a church of the same name, it’s a market where you can buy candles, herbs and other things for folk healing and witchcraft. A woman I later learned to be Cecilia Bonito Martinez, age 61, asked me to take her picture. There are people who want to be in my photographs, even though they don’t know me and will likely never see me again. I like that. Photography is a social product, not an individual one. In some way she and I collaborated on what would become the last photograph ever taken of her while she was alive.
I took four or five frames if I remember right, walked to my bus stop and went home.
Less than three weeks later at 11 am on a Monday in June, gang kids gunned down Cecilia, shooting her at least six times. Her funeral was held at the market itself, cuerpo presente, as they say in Spanish. Pictures of her taken long before mine were on the walls and around her casket.
What I know about Cecilia comes from an article published in an unreliable newspaper in a country where journalists are not trusted. Cecilia’s friend told a reporter that people considered the victim a witch but that she wasn’t one. She had “great philosophical knowledge,” the said, and faith so strong she could cure sickness with prayer.
Was she a witch? Who cares?
The question is whether, knowing what was going to happen, did she approach me because she wanted a last photograph taken with her grandson? Many who are going to die have some idea it’s going to happen. Did she measure her life in minutes rather than days? Did she scan the streets, waiting for killers she could not stop? Indebted to underworld thugs, was she seeking a kind of immortality through snapshots? Or was she just another person asking for a picture because she felt she deserved it?
It was coincidence that I was there. It probably wasn’t coincidence that she asked to be photographed but didn’t ask for a print.
It was creepy and for a time I thought people were dying because I photographed them. It’s an absurd idea and one that would have driven me crazy if I hadn’t dropped it. But it’s not unreasonable to think that way when your art walks between worlds and underworlds.
Disappeared
I don’t remember her name. I met her twice and then she was gone. She came from some nowhere place to Zacatecas, a colonial Mexican town, and took the first job she found. A naive girl from someplace more innocent, she became a prostitute at a notorious cantina.
The cantina had recently been the scene of a shootout between drug cartel soldiers. A half dozen people had been killed there a few months earlier. There were still bullet holes in the walls near the men’s room. It may seem perverse but curiosity about that battle was what brought me there. I’ve always thought, no matter how dangerous a place might seem, they won’t shoot you or turn you away if you buy a drink. So far that’s been true.
Meeting her was a normal cantina encounter. She was drunk, I wasn’t. She sat down next to me and the fact that I said hello was a tacit offer to pay for her beer, which I did. She wanted to bait me into asking her to go to a motel room but that’s not my thing. Never has been, never will be. I suggested we take some pictures instead. I remember she laughed a lot, and every time I looked at her it seemed she’d opened another button on her purple, plaid shirt. The thing sunk down around her shoulders and she seemed content to have it there.
Mexico in 2011 was a nation at war with itself. Daylight gunfights were the norm. Everyone in the country lived with a fear of kidnappers who cut people into pieces or dissolved their bodies in acid. More than 100,000 people went out that way in less than a decade. A guy who called himself an anti-kidnapping expert came to Mexico to teach people how to avoid abduction. He himself got kidnapped and was never heard from again. I’ve always assumed his body is in one of the unmarked, government graves in the Northern State of Coahuila.
Two days after I took this picture I ran into one of her co-workers at a market on the edge of Zacatecas. “Your friend,” she said. She wasn’t crying but her eyes were vacant, distant like those of a dead animal. “They came with guns yesterday and they took her. There were five of them and they dragged her out. I told her not to get involved with them and now she’s gone.”
Some translation might explain what the young lady was saying.
“They” meant the Zetas who ruled Zacatecas, Aguascalientes and San Luis Potosi. “Taken” meant snatched at gunpoint and thrown in some black suburban. It meant they took her to a remote ranch, used her as a sex slave for week, killed her and tossed her in the desert. Being “involved” meant dating or at least sleeping with a member of the Zetas. It may have meant he was a customer and loved her but she was doing a job. Misunderstandings like that crush men’s souls and get women killed. And in Mexico at that time, people would kill you without a second thought. That was true from the desert of Tamaulipas near Texas to the jungles of Tapachula on the Guatemalan border.
My prayer is she escaped, flung open the door of the vehicle they had her in and took off screaming for help. In my fantasy, some rancher with a heart of gold let her into his house. He held off the Zetas with a shotgun while his wife called the Federales.
Connections
But Hymnal is not all tragedy. It’s about my connection to people who’ve passed on, been taken away or passed by when I was out taking pictures. It’s about electricity that flows between people, living, dead, disappeared and imprisoned. It’s an empathetic collection of photographs. If it’s dark, which is how my work is frequently labeled, I hope it also illuminates. The photograph above, of a man I never spoke to, speaks to me about the divinity in all people. From that divinity flows the thing that connects us. This is what Hymnal is about.
John Sevigny is a photographer and teacher who divides his time between the US, Mexico and Central America. See his work at www.johnsevigny.org
