Diego Echevers
When I met with
I met Diego some years ago, he was shooting Canon and I was shooting Nikon, experimenting with Sony, so you get the plot, gear talk mostly.
I met Diego some years ago, he was shooting Canon and I was shooting Nikon, experimenting with Sony, so you get the plot, gear talk mostly.
I could kinda understand his view, after all, I was using my Sony exclusively with manual focus lenses to ease my pace, and, even though I never was trigger happy, shoot less and better.
He lives in Cochabamba, that’s a different city, but in the last months I’ve been traveling a lot so finally we coordinated and met. He is really a kind guy, and his passion about photography, not only as a means but as craftsmanship and cultural asset, shows.
He talked about the history behind several of his cameras and equipment, about a project rescuing the film collection of a studio photographer aforetime dedicated not only to photograph but to retouch the negatives, and quite skillfully so.
We also talk about this times and its crazy running over our fields, its unstoppable fury against the uniqueness and its savage assault for normalization and massification of everything.
You know, I got his rant, the why, after all, he is rescuing a couple of hundred photos from yesteryear and appreciating its value as craft and legacy, the uniqueness of each one as a witness of a moment in time, of a society.
One could argue that now we have and endless flow of information about our culture, its values and insights, as everything is over documented, but thats, in my view, the problem with the over normalization of everything, simply, there is too much, so nothing really matters, we are aware about so many things, that they become trends, not problems.
So, as a personal way, maybe, the analog route its an act of kindness, an act of resistance against the voracious massification and normalization of this social media era, not because the use of film as a medium, but the rescue of a craft, the search for joy of one click and the relevance of it.
Of course, after all that talk I got my digital camera out and quickly snapped some pictures of him to accompany this post, oh well, at least I used a vintage Nikkor manual lens, just to not feel that cynical. Then we both took some selfies together and posted them on social media, I guess, we are kinda doomed, ha…