Finally to Quetzaltenango.

After a couple of attempts I finally made it to Xela or as it's more formally called Quetzaltenango. It has been chucking it down at a rate that it rarely does in the UK and I've been pretty much disabled by the volume of rain that has come down.

I had spent a little time last night thinking about the work of Marcelo Monecino: shots of Guatemala from the 1970's. While they're a good set of shots of various situations and events they may leave a little to be desired in terms of basic technical matters. I thought it would be fun to try to explore the area around the hostel and try to do something that would compliment what was done then. I don't think what is here is that original again I would have to whine that I've tried to do something better than what I've seen before and I don't think that I can really state that I've done anything more that what has already been achieved. One or two of the shots I recall from SBPS. Ho, hum... click de ja vu shots of rainy afternoon in Quetzaltenango.

The town seems quite nice though I don't think that I have had any real opportunity to explore it yet. I caught a microbus (a small independently operated bus service that is run by people who normally look as if they've just come out of prison) from the bus station to close to here and I didn't have any problems. The streets were pretty much deserted with the volume of rain as I walked across the city and I, as I state, took a few shots largely just to have done something other than completed the four and a half hour journey today.

It was amusing taking the shots of the women in shops in the late afternoon, whom I thought would be sat very bored but they seemed to take advantage of the quiet period in the day when nothing happened and chilled out. The two girls who look very much alike, I've got to assume they're sisters, ran and hid rather than state that they didn't want any shots taken. I assume that this was just the superficial game that may be expected and they were flattered rather than willing to pose in a documentary context. As I state it killed a little time but again when I had completed the shots there was more than a tinge of de ja vu.

I did start writing about the prospects of trying to work on a photo-essay today and I don't think that I produced any thing that original....On Marcelo Monecino's work an essay plan included:
He has broken quite a few rules. Some shots remind me of some of the shots of Nepalese kids I have pictures of in the sets I’ve put online in Nepal, with what appear to the western eye to be very uncomfortable smiles. It’s perhaps interesting to think of how well posed and how boldly the smiles of most of the indian kids I saw really did seem to convey a sense of deeper happinnes and yet the images of kids in Nepal were so totally different.

Monecino's locals are shoeless and usually ragged. I don’t know what genre I would describe his work within as there do tend to be a lot of shots that are technically not great but owing to the drama they manage to hold, they work. Despite the main subjects within the shots not having their faces to the camera, to be quite often walking away from the camera and for there to generally to be quite tense composition if any at all, the images hang together well. The images tend to work as documentary slides and possibly because of his willingness to break the rules there is a sense of anarchy about the shots. This is consolidated by the revolutionary atmosphere in shots which include rifles sticking out of bushes mixed in with rather disorganised shots of school children with nuns surrounding them.

There tends to be an absence of motor vehicles altogether from the shots which is substantially different in the wealthier gringo-fied Antigua that I've been in over the last few weeks. Mist tends to hum from the slums and is used to good effect as a backdrop to several scenes. Religious ceremonies tend to only convey a sense of the individual lost in a warehouse like space and local culture experienced in barbershops and other locations tends not to convey more than a bold, cheap environment with few frills.

Some compositional rule breaking does tend to query the seriousness of some shots. For instance, the man with the flag who has the trees behind him that appear to be coming out of the top of his head, and the two men sitting on a coffin of someone perhaps killed in battle. Whilst there are a great many disingenuous images surrounding war and rebellion these may more genuinely convey images of what peasant involvement in military activity has been like in this region - that those involved may be left at a point of exhaustion.

From the other images Monecino has on flickr there appear to be images going back ten years before these were taken giving indication that he had ten years experience. I should weigh this into the time scales I have to work on and consider the images that have been taken so far in my photographic life and work around this particular matter. Some rule breaking may not be warranted and some of it does tend to mock the subject and could be classed as being offensive or derogatory. This project was carried out about thirty five years ago and if I were to replicate much about this I would hope that I could try to have moved with the times and developed further. This does not seem an easy exercise owing to the lack of information I have got on genres and how they have changes specifically within the last thirty years or so.