For SPAN 267 – Image/Word, a Spanish-language class about photography across 20th century Spain, we constantly analyzed different photos and ways in which different photographic styles and skills, as well as cultural and historical context changes their meaning and the story that they tell. We read and wrote about different photographers and theorists in and out of Spain including the likes of John Berger, Roland Barthes, José Ortiz-Echagüe, and Xavier Miserachs.
For an assignment that I particularly enjoyed, we were asked to read several miramientos (“regards”) by Javier Marías, captions (ranging from a few sentences to a few paragraphs) describing photos from his own life as if he were an outside biographer writing about Javier Marías. We were then asked to write a “miramiento” in his style. (attached below, written in Spanish, translated hastily into English)
Something I quite enjoyed about Marías’s work is that in its form, grammar, and tone, it seems like he truly writes from an outsider’s perspective. However, in its content, the work hints that the “biographer” knows more about the subject than he should. I attempted to emulate him in this way, by emulating someone who doesn’t know who he is. It reminds me of the crucial idea I learned through GEM, that to try and achieve cultural competence, one has to separate oneself from their preestablished positionality and truly strive to see things through the lens of another in any given encounter. I believe true cultural competence to be impossible, as like Marías, there is no way to fully separate oneself from oneself and one’s knowledge. I do, however, believe that in the continuous and conscious effort to do so, prejudices are tamed.
