farc-ing in Costa Rica

When the Discovery Channel decided to create a documentary about Tom Hargrove’s epic flight from the hands of the FARC militia in Colombia, they made the smart call and filmed the episode in peaceful Costa Rica. The FARC is a bit of a painful and recent memory for the people of Colombia, and parading a film crew and actors dressed as FARC paramilitary in the jungle would be something like dressing up like Klan members for a shoot in Alabama, simply imprudent and possibly hazardous. The production company Cineflix recreated this epic saga of kidnapping and escape, and brought all of the appropriate props, from the AK-47′s to the militant armbands and  enlisted the director Roger Pike for his brilliant eye with the camera and sense of tension. They also hired me to shoot production stills during the filming.

Roger Pike, Director

Tom’s story is pretty well known. The film “Proof of Life” was loosely based on his saga, and Cineflix was to do it justice with an accurate description of what went down during a year in captivity and his eventual escape.

“In September 1994, I was kidnapped on my way to work when I drove into a roadblock manned by FARC–the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, or the “narco-guerrillas.” FARC initially demanded a $6 million ransom, and kept me in isolated camps high in the northern Andes Mountains.I spent days locked in a dark cell where I could stand, barely, but couldn`t move around. I spent 2.5 months in chains, and endless days, then months, hoarding scraps of food, building campfires to keep warm, and trying to stay sane. I always harbored an empty hope: that another hostage would be brought in, so I`d have a friend (I learned, after my release, that three other hostages were being held in other parts two of the camps). During 334 days of captivity, I never saw a road, a wheel, a window with glass. I never spoke English, and knew nothing of world events outside the FARC camps.”

-Tom Hargrove

Working as a stills photographer on a set is equal parts boring and amazing.  The crew brought into the Costa Rican jungle a silent generator, enough lighting to ignite a house, a full kitchen, trucks of cameras and gear, a reflector that must have been 5×5 meters, and all of the actors and support crew. The director taught me the best trick for shooting in the jungle- use a polarizer. It cuts the glare off the leaves and makes everything look more lush.

You really have no idea when you watch something on television, how much manpower goes into an hour long program. Watching a kidnapping, even a staged one is eerie, and the actor (the one with the gun on the top of the page) was a brilliant and chill Tico guy that morphed into a raging psychopath as soon as the scene began.

Having hiked in the Colombian jungle for a week a couple of years ago ( another story ) I can understand completely the impossibility of survival there. It is a harsh and formidable place where creation seems unfinished and barbaric. For Tom to manage a year of the deep Colombian jungle in hostile captivity is a testament to human survival through pure will.

The shoot was a blast and I gained a lot of respect for the men and women of the film industry, they really work hard and theirs is a labor of love.

Ferenc and István Ivanics in Costa Rica

Ferenc and István Ivanics walk the Earth like Cain from Kung Fu (but without the violence), and three years into their epic 6 year 9000 mile journey they drifted into Costa Rica. I spotted them while I was driving in Villareal and almost wrecked my car rubbernecking, trying to figure out if they were missionaries from a strange cult that tracked UFO’s into the jungle or perhaps something more sinister and bizarre. These are a couple of guys that really stand out, tall, with matching clothes, ZZ- Top beards and homemade digeradoos – and even in an odd place like Tamarindo they definately do not look like our run of the mill tourists or dropout freaks. The next day I approached them on the street and asked them what they were up to. It turns out that they are really warm and funny guys from Hungary that feel compelled to walk, and learn about humanity, life,  and cultures from the road on a mission of peace.  They told me about camping in a desert in Africa that consisted entirely of snail shells as far as the eyes can see, and asked if I knew a local Hungarian woman named Kata. Their blog is a blast, and should definitely be checked out for the humor and open candor about such diverse topics as diarrhea from a three meal a day diet of tacos, random drunken Mexican gunplay, sleeping in a vegetarian insane asylum with the patients, and banking Catch 22′s in Europe. They were booted from Honduras for public begging, and thought to be terrorists by some local Mexicans, although it turns out that looking like a terrorist is better than being a Gringo in parts of rural Mexico. They manage to do this journey with no money (an impressive accomplishment), and they always seem to need new shoes.  I talked them into letting me photograph them in the streets of Tamarindo, and sitting on a broken Jeep next to the beach (irony). When a photographer like me encounters subjects as compelling as these guys, the camera must get involved no matter what, it is just how I interface with the world.

Check out their blog here: http://www.worldwalk-peacetour.blogspot.com/

If any publication wants to do a story on them and needs some decent photos, I will be more than happy to provide high resolution copies for free, whatever helps them on their mission.

When the Ivanics brothers come to your town, give them a place to stay, some food, money, whatever they need and whatever you can spare. Sometimes it seems that with the conquering of space and the climbing of the highest mountains being commonplace these days that there is nothing left to explore, no adventure untapped. Think again. Strip away the transportation of the modern world, regular money, jobs, food, and walk for a few thousand miles with only your wit, balls, and a belief in the decency of humanity, and you will find real adventure. I am happy to have met the brothers Ivanic, thrilled to have photographed them, and envious that I can’t do the same thing. I just can’t imagine what life would be like after such a trip. What can possibly follow that?  Accounting?  Factory work? An office? I think not.  I hope that they become teachers or write a bestselling book.

Good luck Ferenc and István. See you on the other side.

-Sean

Camera: D3 shot RAW

Lens: Zeiss 100mm Zf.2 and Sigma 15-30

Lighting: Broncolor Mobil, Pulso Head & P45 Reflector

On the street in Tamarindo

Relaxing on an abandoned Jeep on the beach

Backpacks in 2 languages

]]> http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/world-walk-peace-tour/feed/ 2 http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/la-guajira-colombia/ http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/la-guajira-colombia/#comments Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:30:03 +0000 admin http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/?p=346

Healing Shells and Potions

Our Hostess

Shipwreck

Goat Leg Lunch

This is the end of the world, a place so beautiful and desolate, forsaken by God and government in the middle of nowhere Colombia on the coast bordering Venezuela. The Lonely Planet guidebook that we were using for travel information ended paradoxically hundreds of kilometers away from here, giving this place that special travel mystique that is hard to find in these days of accessible tourism. Getting to Cabo de la Vela was a bitch. Helene and I stopped at a crossroads dotted by a few food merchants where the bus line dropped us off  before it continued en route to Venezuela. This is the desert, the real outback of Colombia, with an Indigenous population living further off the grid than I could begin to imagine. Passage to Cabo de la Vela was to be made in the back of a pickup truck that served as a taxi, covered with a tarp to ward off the brutal sun, and filled with 23 Wayuu Indians and a live goat that was hogtied and shrieking randomly. If you have never traveled with a hogtied goat, you will not understand the eerily human-like sounds that it produces when frightened. It sounds something like an abused child with Down’s Syndrome crying in panic, and the sound is deeply disturbing. There was no room in the pickup, we were packed and stacked like cordwood as we bumped along the endless rutted dirt road towards the sea that never seemed to get any closer. I am a tall man, 6’2” plus pack, and I was doubled over and compressed for the length of the journey. We passed through small Wayuu villages  to pick up and drop off the passengers. It seems impossible that these people should be able to survive in these conditions, the villages are just a few huts made of found material and trash, with makeshift roofs, no windows, nailed together somehow to protect the people from the brutal and impossible desert. What these people do for survival and sustenance evades me. There is no water or electricity. There is no farmable land, no infrastructure, access to education, churches, nothing, just goats and Indians clawing away at the barren land in an unholy symbiosis of mutually dependent survival. I believe that goat must be on the menu every night, as I simply could not see anything else to eat other than weeds and rocks.

After what seemed like hours the sky began to change to a deeper blue and we knew that the sea was close. Cabo de la Vela is a tourist destination of sorts. It is home to a kind of mutant spring break for young Colombians that come to this seaside desert and party like hell for a week and then depart to a more fertile and hospitable home elsewhere. The only industry in this region is a coal mine far away. The Indians that live here are a mix of local Indigenous mixed with Islamic pilgrims from somewhere that must have been hellish enough to prompt a move to this desolate and lost outpost. The town of Cabo consists of small houses made of sticks from a scrawny local tree, a couple of dilapidated concrete buildings, a radio tower, and not much more. There was an infestation of mosquitos that week that was unusual, and no one in town was in any way prepared to deal with the sleepless nights that a sudden and unexpected mosquito plague brings. Everyone was swatting bugs all night, and Cabo has no electricity of running water so that means no fans, no bed coverage because of the intense heat, no repellant for hundreds of miles, no relief from the biting torment. There was also, confusingly, no place to sleep on a budget. There were thatch rooms for rent on the beach at $40 per night and no one would budge on the price despite the town being utterly devoid of tourism. This price was well beyond our budget considering that we were living on a couple of dollars a day the week before, fishing and eating coconuts on a desolate beach near Santa Marta. In town, we found a hamburger stand with a generator and some Latin boombox music, and asked about a place to stay while eating a sad hamburger on a stale bun. The proprietor mentioned that we could pitch out tent at her house, she had a water tank, but her generator at home was broken. It woud be $10 a day. It would do.

Her family was lovely. All of us laughed and spoke of the world, we asked questions about life in Cabo. It seems that she and her husband had wanted out, away from people, society, everything, and had moved to Cabo and built a simple house and lived a simple and happy life. I could relate in every way, as I have always felt like I was carrying  a crushing weight when I lived in the States and needed to flee and be far away from what I had always considered to be ever-widening circles of meaningless, soul crushing activity. Later that morning we bought a freshly killed goat leg from a dirty truck, no wrapping, no refrigeration. They just handed us a goat leg with the fresh blood still dripping. Our hostess hung it on a hook next to the house that was out of the sun, and I watched the flies begin land on our lunch. She cooked it well, and we ate with the family for lunch with beans and rice. The next day, across the street in a makeshift hut church, I saw a full blown Penecostal Baptism of the holy spirit complete with speaking in tongues, wild gesticulation, crying and praises to Jesus. It was surreal. The Indians in this hellish place, without sleep from swarms of mosquitos were engaging in this most bizarre American sect of Christianity, gibbering away in unknown dialects and asking God for a mercy that he had surely forgotten to grant eons ago. I suppose whatever mission reaches a place first wins the hearts and minds. Here it was the Pentecostals. Later I went to a local store to buy some potable water in a plastic bag and some ice when a small naked child shit on the floor. It seemed strangely natural. His mother was a teenager and seemed ill prepared for motherhood, as I am sure was her mother before her and so on. With no electricity or water, there is not a lot of activities that are non carnal. Screwing is free, or at least free for nine months.

After a long walk on the beach we went to a small voodoo type shop in the town perimeter to check it out. It sold mostly shark based products, skins and oil, turtle shells and bones. Beasts with large power are to be consumed and ingested to transfer their energy to powerless people. The Chinese have been at this for millennia and it looked like the Indians had been practicing this for quite a long time as well. Everything had a purpose here, shark oil for some ailments, ground turtle shell for something else. There were bottles of snakes in liquid for God knows what. I found Cabo to be beautiful in a strange way. Helene and I sat on the beach and watched fisherman catch baitfish with nets in primitive boats while oil tankers drifted by from Venezuela to Northward destinations full of the precious cargo that powers the civilized world. La Guajira is not the civilized world, not by a stretch. It is wild and untamed, savage and brutal. The light here is striking,  laser sharp, and the buildings made of cement crumbling in disrepair have an apocalyptic beauty in the afternoon with the sun at the perfect angle of illumination. The lone concrete church looks like a weapon, some horror designed in the futuristic ’70′s that is an architectural model of fear and control. Our vision of architecture in retrospect is crystal clear, but like propaganda, it can’t really be noticed for what it is until years later.

I really loved my days in Cabo. I will never return, but I am glad that I went. The people are tough, the landscape is brutal, the life is impossible. It is a beautiful place, interesting in so many ways. I was an outsider like I have never felt before. I could have landed from a spacecraft and felt more connected to humanity. La Guajira is the end of the world, but it is a good place to be for a while. When we travel, we consume difference; that is the point and that is why we leave our comfort in search of the unknown. La Guajira is a lot of difference to consume, but as any exotic travel the learning is the reward.

Helene and our Taxi

Typical Home Construction

]]> http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/la-guajira-colombia/feed/ 2 http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/fisheye-life-portrait/ http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/fisheye-life-portrait/#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 03:40:55 +0000 admin http://seandavisphotographic.com/blog/?p=403

A young campesina girl studies English with a coloring book at her simple home in Costa Rica. The house, considered old at about 50 years, is a simple wooden structure without windows and with garden fence covering as room dividers. The photo is composed in the style of Emmit Gowin series that was shot in the early ’70s depicting home life in Danville Virginia that he shot with an 8×10 camera with a 4×5 lens that gave a strong fisheye effect. Lighting was natural for this photograph, and the girl was unaware that I was shooting her as the camera was pointed in the center of the room. She looks so calm, and it is easy to imagine her in any setting no matter how modern or urban. The house is located very far off the beaten path on a mountain near Playa Negra, and the family commutes primarily on horseback. These people are truly the salt of the earth, and possess a morality and simplicity that is graceful and lacking in our modern connected world. Studying English is the best way for her to insure a prosperous future with the strong demands of multicultural tourism just miles away. That being said, the photo depicts a subject and setting that is universal, despite the simple and impoverished surroundings.

Somehow, I blame Werner Herzog for all of this. Whenever I manage to do something stupid in a “man versus nature” sort of way, I can’t help but to think that somehow the Bavarian madman director is influencing my bad decisions. Anyone that has seen the superb documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo can feel the allure of the jungle, and the romance of capturing the essence of unspoiled wilderness and the people that live there.

This trek in the Colombian jungle is 52 km of pure sweaty hell. There are several river crossings, numerous mountains, thousands of slippery tiny stairs, a hundred billion mosquitos, and the Colombian military thrown in the mix for good measure. You pay a campesino to guide you through this “green hell” to the lost city of the Kogui indians, the only indians on the continent not conquered by the Spanish. The city is frankly not that spectacular, but the journey getting there is forever burned into my psyche. The indian population is stone age, literally lacking in all technology. I had a vision of the pre Colombian indian living a healthy and peaceful agrarian life, free of the torment of the modern age. The reality is different. Infant mortality is more than 30 percent, and what is left of this civilization is kept in relative seclusion by tribal elders and the Colombian government. Often when preserving indigenous cultures we run the risk of crossing a fine line and creating human zoos instead. I believe that we protect their culture as a benifit to us, and I could not help but think that these Indians could have been much better off with something as simple as a hammock, because the woman and children sleep on the cold, hard ground (this is apparently the cause of much illness in their community).

The Koguis are facinating. They practice a form of polygamy, with every man having two separate wives at different stages of his life. As a young man, he is given an older wife to show him the ropes and teach him the ways of manhood. When he gets a bit older, he trades in the older wife for a young one, and he, in turn, becomes the teacher. (Note: I have no idea what the older wife winds up doing.) From my observation the men do very little, and the women tend to most of the hard work. The men spend the bulk of their days with a ceremonial gourd. The gourd contains a small stick, and the man chews cocoa leaves and puts the stick in his mouth and covers it with spit. The stick is then rapidly rubbed against the outer neck of the gourd depositing and drying the congealed mucus uniformly, creating a hard shell of spit shellac that can grow to an inch in diameter. The highly phallic action, not surprisingly symbolizes fertility and spousal devotion. The Koguis would often hang out at our camps looking for food and watching our women shower. I managed a couple conversations with the Indians, the most interesting being when I was holding a picture book of the lost city. The Koguis touched all of the faded photographs in the book with great enthusiasm. It was if I was watching the Sumerians looking at a book on their demise, and the whole experience was very vivid and unsettling.

Photography here is murderous. The humidity is impossible, and the weight of a pro level DSLR with fast lenses in a dry bag made for a 20 kilo backpack. It took at least 4 minutes to set up a shot, and the Koguis were unnerved with having an a large and intimidating black Nikon pointed at their faces.

Bring the best hiking shoes that money can buy, the best hiking sandals that you can find, a great ergonomic backpack, and purchase the mosquito soap that comes in the black package in Colombian stores that smells like a Union Carbide superfund site. The soap is the only thing that discourages the bugs, and I could have sold a bar for a hundred dollars to an Israeli hiker that got positively demolished by bug bites. If you are out of shape, don’t go. If you demand ANY kind of comfort, forget it. You sleep in the jungle for a week in hammocks, eat greasy food, hike in the brutal heat over endless muddy hills, sometimes in the pouring rain. You will cross rivers with a full backpack (mine with a camera). You will be in some dangerous situations where you could fall a very long way down to the river, with the hospital many bumpy hours away. You will smell very, very bad, and my clothing that I wore there still stinks of that journey. Pony up the few bucks for the Cocaine tour on day 2 where you can watch a nervous Colombian farmer in a black plastic tent process cocoa leaves with battery acid, some nylons stockings, and some chemicals that you would never want in your body. You can sample his product for free, but the stink of the process discouraged everyone in my group except a French derelict that eventually  got carted off the mountain by the military for dehydration. Do collect as many leaves as you can for chewing on the way. I am convinced that I survived day 2 because of copious cocoa chewing, and it is lighter and more portable then a case of Red Bull.  Bring the soldiers that are stationed at the lost city some magazines and interact with them as much as possible because they are bored as hell in the middle of nowhere. One let me play with a mortar (without rocket), but nothing that I could say  to him would convince him to let me fire a couple of live rounds of his Galil ARM 5.56mm assault rifle. They are keen to be photographed, and their camp at the top of the hill is a trip. There is a massive, somewhat pornographic mural in their commons shack, tons of tents, and fun weapons. They like to play cards and stare at tourist women, even if the woman looked as haggard and broken as the ones in our small group.

The trip is worth doing, and you will learn how far that your body and mind can go. You will feel like you are so far in the middle of nowhere that is becomes part of your conscious experience, somewhat like the way you feel when underwater or maybe outer space. The motto “Machu Picchu  is for pussies and fat tourists” is often overheard, and everyone in my hiking party was well traveled, a badass, and currently living outside of their home country. One couple could have sprinted the whole thing, and remained cheerful and sprite despite the hardship. If the Colombian soldier had allowed me to shoot a couple of live rounds you can best believe they would have been aimed at that couple.

If you have any questions about doing this trek, send me an email at tamarindophoto@gmail.com

-Sean

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Here is an interesting, but overly dramatic documentary about the Kougi.

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