Living through his eyes
by Jose F. Peláez
I’m writing this as I listen to Jamie Cullum. Who else? I don’t like Jamie but Alfredo states he is the Number One. And since I see reality through Alfredo’s eyes I always play Jamie when I want some of his class transferred onto me, some elegance and a wink from that infinite sign laying down. One must be a rascal in order to show so much faith as he shows in a doubt, in a never ending exercise of checkpoints that burn and burst into non existing colors, yet colors that are.
Alfredo is the Jamie Cullum of photography. He never bursts, he never gives what he’s asked for. A personal style, a basic wardrobe in his eyes. Jamie is the Alfredo of music. I listen to one and see the other. I look at Venice’s photograph series but I listen to Gran Torino. They’ve come to share the same space in my head, the same concept that manages to offer the darkest white and the clearest black. Water with the Sun in it. The corner of Monet and Sinatra.
One needs to know how to look, Alfredo doesn’t use tricks, he just shows you who he is for you to be reflected on it. You were already there but you hadn’t seen it. You hadn’t seen yourself. He shows you who your are so that you can understand yourself. He shows me what I am so that I can recognize myself. That is something only possible when it comes from talent, from that moment when the evening becomes night, from the day young becomes old. A faint smile prior to dissatisfaction, an elegant bullfighter’s pass on a Thursday afternoon admiring the sea.
His work is because it makes us be, it’s art because it makes an artist out of the viewer. Thanks to it we’ll be able to admire what we want to live, we’ll be able to live what we hadn’t dreamt about yet and that, as Cullum sings, it’s called living.
Living through Alfredo’s eyes.