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.
Stephen Alvarez
Sewanee
I ran across this unpublished image today while starting a big edit of my cave work.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.
Stephen Alvarez
Sewanee, TN
A prayer vigil in La Compeurta, Guatemala.
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.
A reproduced doorway of temple 22. It is known as the puerto de los infermos, Doorway to the underworld. The glyphs clearly show that the Maya viewed this door as being in the cave of the temple.
I always seem to be making my lighting technique up as I go. I knew for months that I had to photograph this doorway at Copán, but instead of packing cases of lights, I headed to Honduras with my assistant and little more than a camera bag. We made arrangements with the site director to visit after hours and then headed to the hardware store. For $200 I bought enough copper wire to tap into some power lines near the doorway and we hooked up strings of regular household bulbs to light the place up.
It is always good to be able to think on your feet.
-Stephen Alvarez
I think) once said that if a photographer can only work in beautiful light they were going to have a pretty short career. It is advice that I have always taken to heart. Good pictures sometimes happen in bad light. Sometimes they happen because of bad light.
In keeping with yesterday's religion theme, Don Phillipe, the shaman of Joloniel prays before 3 crosses in a cave in the mountains of Chiapas as part of a Day of the Cross celebration. It is a Catholic ceremony with deep deep Maya roots. Maya religion found refuge within the Catholic church and has existed sometimes happily, sometimes not for centuries. In fact if you ask people in Joloniel they will say that their Day of the Cross service is Catholic. The practice is somewhere between Christian and Maya in a syncretic netherworld.
The cross in Maya religion can represent the corn plant and the day of the cross falls at the end of the dry season in Chiapas. Fields are cleared and planted in anticipation of rains that should come soon. The crosses in the cave are the cross of christ but they are also the Maya corn plant that give Maya society life.
Maya cave ceremonies are notoriously closed events. I was only able to photograph this one with the help of Karen Bassie-Sweet who had been working in Joloniel for years. At one point shooting in the cave my long time assistant Jesus Lopez leaned close to me and said "Stephen, NO ONE has ever seen anything like this before."
My response was, "I know, Jesus, give me another roll of film."
-Stephen Alvarez
Naj Tunich is a Maya pilgrimage cave in Guatemala's Peten. Heavily visited in the classic Maya era it was abandoned for centuries before being "discovered" in the early 1980's - THIS picture is from one of those rituals.
Amazingly just after the cave's rediscovery Maya began making pilgrimages to the cave and holding rituals there again.
This photo of my assistant Jesus Lopez in front a Maya Hieroglyphic panel is one of my favorites from my work deep in the cave. It reminds me of being in a sacred space and working with Jesus who even though he does not like caves would go anywhere to make a photo.
-Stephen Alvarez
