eastside living LA

Joseph Rodriguez Brings it Home

The award-winning photojournalist, famous for his wrenching depictions of East L.A. gang life, shows in the city for the first time – and talks to ELLA about the grey areas, where personal struggles shape a professional pursuit of social justice.

 

By Beige Luciano-Adams

Images from “Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City”

 

For two decades, Joseph Rodriguez has traveled the world, following a tangled trail of human struggle and redemption. Past projects have taken him to Romania at the end of the Cold War, to Zambia to chronicle the AIDS orphan epidemic, to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, and to Argentina’s imploded socio-economic cosmos shortly after.

Equally as pressing and urgent, his work in the U.S. has taken him to the extraordinary inner lives of ordinary people – on the path of Katrina refugees; in the resurrection of his own troubled youth to reach children in Northern California’s juvenile justice system; and in rare, brutally present images of East L.A. gang families. 

“I’m very committed as a photojournalist to stories that reflect important social issues here in California,” says the New-York-born photographer, “because it’s like a second home to me, personally – but professionally, California sort of sets the trends for the rest of the nation.”

It was Rodriguez’s haunting reportage on LA gang life in the early 1990s – the result of several years of patient and often dangerous work at an apex of gang activity in this city – that helped earn him worldwide acclaim. But more than a decade on, these iconic images are still fringe material: they have been shown in Mexico City and in New York, but never in Los Angeles.

From Feb. 14 to March 15, Rodriguez opens his first L.A. exhibition at the DRKRM Gallery in Glassell Park. The series, “Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City,” is a rooted glance at the lives of sex workers in the Latin American metropolis. 

Like his work on LA gangs, “Flesh Life” is the ember of a dying practice.

 

Listening From the Ground

“I came from the bottom looking up,” says Rodriguez, a reference to his troubled past that also describes the mechanics of his work, which largely features people in difficult situations; marginalized, forgotten or cast off by society. His subjects are vulnerable, easily objectified – but Rodriguez evades that trap, and complicates the dialogue.

“I often tell people I went from shooting drugs to shooting pictures,” he says. After leaving Riker’s Island Prison for the second time in 1971, Rodriguez worked on his rehabilitation and took up photography for the first time – “nothing serious, just amateur.”

But he rediscovered it some years later, after he was several years into a graphic design career. “I liked working with the medium because I could create something that was mine, it gave me a voice,” he says.

Rodriguez uses that voice – and generally, a 35mm film camera – to engage the subjects of his work. And they engage right back. The result is an organic, unflinching humanity, an unmistakable empathy – and often, curious hilarity or defiant joy roaring from the gritty pulp. 

In “Juvenile” (Powerhouse Books, 2004) Rodriguez brought his own experience to bear on an examination of children caught in the gauges of a tainted system. The project (also a multimedia documentary) focuses on a few kids from the Bay Area, he says, “but go look at it, you’ll see my mug shots,” as well as heartbreaking notes he wrote to his own family from behind bars. 

“I remember what it was like being in Riker’s Island and having no support, being an addict,” says the photographer, who followed juveniles in and out of the criminal justice cycle, probation officers, judges and courts in the 1990s, when he says young kids were being given “really harsh sentences.” For Rodriguez, it was the right time to address a problem that he could help bring awareness to.

“I try to talk about the situation, document the situation, in the hopes to bring people to have dialogue and change things,” he says. “I have a different platform in where I start from – that’s the reason why I’ve been able to gain this kind of intimacy.”

The kind of intimacy he’s talking about comes from years of staying present with people, walking in their shoes or alongside them, listening to them. Part activist, part artist and part journalist, Rodriguez has developed his own way of seeing.

“I spend a lot of time with people, I use my ears,” he says. “A lot of photographers don’t do that. When we listen we can learn something. But that is something in this age of interruption, with all our technology, that people don’t have time for.”

Driven by a sense of urgency and duty, Rodriguez still takes his time, and uses his own money to fund projects, many of which are too unnerving or volatile for mainstream publishers.

“It’s important to listen to us – us meaning the world,” he says, “with the hopes of trying to document some sense of social history. We have a responsibility to see these stories, even though media corporations tell us Americans that we’re overwhelmed.”

 

Eastside Stories

In May 1990 – the year he cites as the real beginning of his photographic career – he came to L.A. for the first time. Having finished a project on Spanish Harlem, he headed West, thinking he would put together an easy piece on the city’s gang culture.

“The idea was to do more of a Westside story, with a gang or two,” he recalls. “I was very naive, i didn’t know know how many guns were on the streets at that time.” 

After he began to interview gang families, he realized the “the amount of responsibility I would have to have to really tell these stories. So it went from a project I thought would be lyrical – to one where it became like photographing war.” 

To tell a “truer” story, he decided to move to Los Angeles. From 1992 to 1994 he “moved all around the city, from San Pedro to East L.A.” And everywhere he went, he found the stories to be similar; families were saying the same thing. 

Several of the subjects of Eastside Stories, which unfolds largely against the backdrop of Boyle Heights, have since been killed in gang-related violence. The collection, which includes scenes of bloodshed and everyday family life (equally bathed in an ethos of farcical, deadly machismo) is a morbid diorama manned with ghosts and painful memories – but one with a point.

“The gang work is meant for our children,” he says, adding that he’s received emails from children and families from all over the country. “So many beautiful stories…” 

“It’s a calling,” he says of photography. “It’s about social injustice.”

 

Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City

The current exhibition at DRKRM Gallery features 25 prints taken from the eponymous book (Powerhouse, 2006), the product of three separate trips to Mexico City in 1996 and 1997. Startling and banal, grotesque and beautiful, these images were captured in a moment of transition, when the city was coming to grips with its own normative myths about sexuality.

“We were doing Migrantes in Mexico city,” says Rodriguez, who was following Mexican migrant families back and forth in the dangerous trek to El Norte with his frequent collaborator, writer Ruben Martinez. “We were just walking around seeing sex workers, an amazing sight. But we couldn’t even photograph because it was so intense and so dangerous.” 

So they split up and left, but Rodriguez returned by himself, fixated on what he had seen as an important historical moment in the country’s capital city.

“I started looking more closely at women and men, then transvestites and gay culture in Mexico City. It was a time when people were starting to come out,” he says. 

Twelve years later, the work is still relevant, and a fitting debut. John Matkowsky, manager of DRKRM Gallery, says he had wanted to show the prints from “Eastside Stories: Gang Life in East L.A.,” but found “Flesh Life” in time for Valentine’s Day. 

According to the artist, “West LA was not feeling this work at all. It’s too ‘now,’ it’s in the newspapers,” he says, implying that most people wouldn’t be interested for that reason. 

But for Matkowsky, it was a perfect fit. “What DRKRM is trying do is cater mostly to documentary photographers, mostly photojournalists and essay stuff you don’t get to see too often in galleries.”

 

The Road Ahead

Matkowsky plans to show Rodriguez’s other work next fall, including “Eastside Stories” and his current projects on immigration – although the former presents some issues for the gallery, which is located in a neighborhood known for gang activity. 

“I don’t think there would be a problem with gang members,” says Matkowsky. “I’m definitely considering it. I just have to figure out how to do it so it’s not just glorifying gangs,” he says, stressing that Rodriguez’s work “is not not doing that – but people might perceive it as such. So if I have two shows at once, maybe one can dilute the other.”

Matkowsky is also considering Rodriguez’s work on immigrants, which is already shot. For the forthcoming book, “Migrantes,” the photographer followed families crossing the border over a period of six years.

“I’m really committed to issues like that lately, especially related to Latinos here in the U.S.,” says Rodriguez.

Asked if he would revisit the families in “Eastside Stories,” he says he stays “somewhat connected. I haven’t been there for a long time… but maybe a film.

“If i had money, you’d see Joe here a lot. In California there are millions of issues. [He names the Central Valley, water, the desert]. I feel that [this state] is politically and socially relevant to the rest of the country.”

Having traversed the globe, Rodriguez knows that Americans can be even more insulated than others from the harsh realities of life in the developing world. “So we brought the world to you,” he says. 

But he has also committed himself to unearthing the brutality, injustice and tragedy – as well as the levity, wonder and beauty therein – taking place in our own communities.

“It’s not very popular, the kind of photography I do. I feel like the beat generation. But this is a very important point – it really is for the people, it’s about the people.” 

 

www.josephrodriguezphotography.com

“Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City” opens on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14 • Artist reception from 7pm – 10pm at DRKRM Gallery • 2121 San Fernando Road, Ste. 3 • Los Angeles, CA 90065 • Tel 323.223.6867 • www.drkrm.com