Friday, November 11, 2005

On Assignment: El Paso, Texas-Day Three

DesertWesLoRes
"Space to Ponder" by Wes Aldridge

Today was long. I spent a good bit of the day in Juarez, Mexico. It was an emotional time for me. What I saw opened my eyes to the reality of poverty. Juarez could only be described by me as a slum. I had never witnessed anything like it before. The houses were tiny shacks, thrown together with anything you could think of. The cars were circa 1987, rundown and on the last leg. The people had grief and defeat written across their sun-beaten faces. There were so many things to see... and I wasn't able to take one photograph of the massive tragic reality that surrounded me. I was with a translator and she sped us around to the locations that I had to get photographs of, never stopping in the thick of it all.

I must return there and document the things I see through photography.

This is a self portrait I did while I was shooting close to sundown in the desert. I was enjoying the beautiful landscape and thinking a lot about the things I saw today. I figured I wanted to make this a lasting memory for me. I sat the camera down on some rocks and got the self-timer going. The shot actually turned out in focus and with a pretty nice and even exposure. With sunlight like that, its pretty hard to go wrong.

"Quelli che passa prima che ci rimarremo nella memoria."