above, a Maya cave ceremony at Naj Tunich, Guatemala
December 20 2012 marks the end of the current Maya Long Count calendar. So will the world end tonight? Well the calendar certainly does and it is an extraordinarily long calendar. The current calendar started August 11, 3114 BCE. So what happens tomorrow?
Fire and Brimstone? Planet X colliding with the earth? Instagram seizing user identities? Other unspeakable horrors?
Happy Halloween. Halloween is celebrated a lot of different ways in different places. In Santiago Atitlan a statue of Saint Francis is carried to the church the evening before Halloween. San Francisco oversees the righteous dead.
I ran across this unpublished image today while starting a big edit of my cave work. It is a drawing of the Maya Hero Twins from a cave in Guatemala. The Hero Twins are the central characters of the Maya creation story recorded in the Popul Vuh. The hero twins did battle with the lords of the underworld, emerged victorious and made the world safe for human beings. I've got a soft spot for them, and as I start editing my years and years of underground work to see if it can be a coherent book I want to keep this picture close by.
Yesterday I was just talking with another photographer about the pitfalls of confusing the feeling of a place with what it actually looks like. Often it is hard to separate the experience of making a photo with the photo itself. It is one of the great traps of editing. It is also why many photographers are so bad at editing their own work. We tend to like pictures that we liked making or photographs that we worked hard to make often ignoring whether the picture is strong or not.
The picture above is a perfect example, it took me years to separate making it from the image itself.
I mean I loved making this photograph in La Compuerta. I worked incredibly hard to get the community to trust me and let me photograph this ceremony. The vigil is to ask permission to enter the Maya pilgrimage cave Naj Tunich.
