Reinaldo Ladagga
Reinaldo Laddaga is an Argentinean writer and artist who lives in New York. He has taught at several universities of the Americas and Europe. He’s the author of a number of books on contemporary art; The Head Collector. On Andy Warhol’s grand occasions is the last. His latest novel is a political satyr titled The Men from Russia; and in 2022 he published (under the title Atlas of the Eclipse) a chronicle in words and images of his walks across New York during the pandemic. He’s currently working on a book about the Spanish-French-American polymath Jaime de Angulo.
Three natural books
1. Panic plants
2. Lava, leaks and lakes
3. Burning matter
Three Natural Books is an assemblage of photographs taken over the last two years. They are snapshots,
shots taken on the fly, stopping for less than an instant during a walk or from this or that vehicle. They are shots taken without technique, relying on the camera’s calculations, and with no objective other than to modulate the world for me. When Syd Krochmalny invited me to show some of them exactly a week ago, I started to gather some of the tens of thousands I had accumulated; I set myself to the task a bit like the improviser who recalls and plays the musical phrases he learned he doesn’t know when. In the process, I incurred in that musical technique: the counterpoint, where several voices play different lines (congruent or incongruent) but intertwined. The result is not a finished work: it is a test, an exercise. Each series has something more or less than two hundred images; the speed at which they pass is not stipulated. I have not tried to encrypt any meaning; I’ve placed tones in harmony or conflict as I saw fit. The starting point of the associations are three expressions that came to my mind almost at the same instant (the instant I started to compose them); each one is now the title of one of the parts.
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Panic plants includes images taken chiefly in various gardens and cemeteries in New York, but extends to Joshua Tree Park (the Devil Garden, where the jumping chollas grow); the shore of the Pacific Ocean at the Lost Cost, north of San Francisco; and, near the Mexican border, the community of Ocotillo Wells.
Lava, leaks, and lakes deal with fluids in their free state, crystallized in lava rocks or frozen in clouds, where the sun uses them as prisms. I took the photographs at various sites in California and Nevada: the Antelope Nature Refuge that exists in the northern part of this state; the vast expanse of mud hills, worked by the rare rains, at the southern end of the former (Anza Borrego National Park, in the West, and the Chocolate Mountains in the Sonoran Desert); the volcanic zone that extends into northeastern California and encompasses Mount Lassen (where boiling mud pits and rushing streams abound) and a collection of petroglyphs in the Mojave Desert.
Burning stuff collects images taken, mostly, but not only in forests. They are images of reality worked by
fire. Wood predominates, but you will find other substances as well. The photos were taken in the redwood
rainforests that stretch along the Pacific coast’ in the Lava Beds National Monument in northern California;
near the Rodman Mountains in the Mojave, where we found an abandoned construction of sticks and plastic whose identity we could not pinpoint; in the remains left by the Paradise Fire, the most intense in the history of the country.