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| Being Mārtiņš Grauds Alise Tīfentāle To engage with yourself and have a good time, whatever you're doing - this could be one of the definitions of happiness appropriate to Mārtiņš Grauds. All the best stories concern one and the same thing: the search for happiness and harmony, no matter how banal these words might sound. Mārtiņš Grauds gives the impression of having gotten quite far in this quest - he speaks in full sentences, doesn't forget were he began, doesn't mix conversation topics and expresses himself in lucid and pleasant Latvian, throwing in some trendy slang from time to time. He is wont to retell his private adventures in the second person, evidently so that I and other listeners might understand better. And it seems to work. Grauds is involved in photography, directs commercials and music videos, DJs for radio NABA, is bringing up a son, meets with his friends and does a great many other things that give him pleasure, and is very willing to talk about it all. Mārtiņš Grauds has photographed in Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, India, Nepal, China and a great many other places, is currently preparing to go to Georgia and wants to visit Cuba before Fidel Castro dies and capitalism sets in along with a flourishing tourist industry. The album Lükoties will present his photographs from South Asia. Grauds may be regarded as a respectable artist since 2002, when his photo series Nature Morte was shown in the frame of "Social Exhibitionism". Shown on TV have been music videos directed by Grauds, for the group Brainstorm, The Satellites, The Movies, etc. Grauds' unhurried stories about his travels, his photographs and his music videos always contain something discrete: breathtaking effects, shocking moments or paradoxes should not be sought here. Every city in every age needs its own Marco Polo, who travels to distant countries and then, in the words of the author himself, retells his experiences "patiently and gratefully". Without shooting, chases or other serious, consciously provoked threats to one's life. A kind of relaxed Indiana Jones on vacation. One mustn't expect to see in his photographs that which isn't there: Grauds is an observer, and a very calm one at that, an observer with a sense of composition of the kind that's known among photographers as classic. Grauds is not one of those ready to leap under a train, incite a fight or willingly climb into a nest of poisonous, aggressive insects for the sake of getting an incredible picture. On the other hand, his photographic vision is sensitive: he notices nuances that many of us would not regard as worth discussing, retelling and recording. Thus, a case where Grauds chanced to drive the wrong way in a one-way street in central Riga has been turned into a significant feature of his personal mythology. His stories deal with the people met on his travels, with visas he could not get and with private revelations. With the great changes and discoveries that emerge from trifles and anecdotal events. Not for nothing is there a reference in the title to Spike Jonze's film "Being John Malkovich": this is a small trip into the consciousness of the travelling Mārtiņš Grauds and an account of what I saw there, presenting for your attention a whole album of verbal snapshots. | |
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The three minutes - It's a strange thing I've noticed on every trip. The first two weeks pass, and then there's a kind of click: the soul catches up with the body, because you've been moving at such an awesome speed that your soul can't keep up, and two weeks later your poor soul reaches on foot the place where you are. You can feel this physiologically: for three minutes you feel an intense twinge. Nostalgia, and at the same time a sense of "who am I and what am I doing here?" A feeling that demands an embryo posture. After those three minutes, you suddenly feel slightly uncomfortable, and you have the feeling that you've been accepted in that alien environment, and that's an interesting kind of situation. A story about shaving - I always shave when I travel to Asia. It's the first human touch, a kind of attitude. And it means entrusting your neck. Actually, they're amazingly good at shaving in Asia. They ask: Do you want a proper shave or just a quick one? I'm baffled, but it turns out that a "proper shave" means they stretch and work your skin so intensively that your beard doesn't grow for three days. Very thorough. A story about Everest and humility "At an altitude of more than three kilometres, you get a speck in your eye, which stings all the time. I can't blink, and all the time my left eye's watering. Somewhat ironic: a photographer in one of the most beautiful places he's ever been to, but he can hardly see a thing. His eye's watering, but he senses instinctively what has to be pictured: he raises his camera, nods his head and cries. That's because of the altitude, says Lama. Not to worry - it'll get better when we climb down. It's not that I'm particularly worried, but perhaps I could've done without that speck. On the fifth day of the trek, a very impressive panorama opens up from a mountain ridge. Lama points to a small peak: that's Everest. Out of respect for the great peak, I take a picture, although from this vantage point it's like photographing a sparrow sitting on a telephone pole. Instead of Everest, I turn to a likeable old lady named Bamu Lama, who turns shy at first, then rushes into her house and returns, dressed in a lovely embroidered jacket. As is usually the case in such situations, there's black and white film in the camera. No point in thinking about what could have been. After all, I've photographed a rainbow, too, in black and white". (Mārtiņš Grauds, "Lama is good...", Rīgas Laiks, January 2003) First love - My first Asian trip was in 2000: I went to check it out. Mainly to see what effect it would have on me. I developed a relationship with the camera. The next time I was already going with the idea of photographing. And the first adventure that gave me satisfaction with what I'd done was the first trip. Before that, I'd come to understand that I just had to travel somewhere. I threw myself into a completely alien cultural environment for three months. Why Asia in particular? I knew it had to be a different cultural milieu. It couldn't be Europe: I'll leave that for my retirement. Some of my friends had spent extended periods in South Asia, likewise on their own. On my first trip, it was absolutely clear to me that I'd go to Laos via Thailand, perhaps also to Myanmar, and that's how it turned out. Then the trip also came to include Cambodia, because when you're over there, you hear from other travellers the hot news about what's interesting. I developed an unusual relationship with the camera. In the first place, it's your conversation partner: you can talk to other travellers or the locals, but there may be nothing to disturb you, and then you can delve into what you're photographing. That possibility instantly opens your perception and you become so sensitive. After this first trip, I came to understand that all those video effects and computer graphics are redundant. In truth, there's only in focus or out of focus, faster or slower, longer or shorter shots. And that's quite enough. There's nothing more you need. That's not possible in Riga. You have to be hypersensitive to do it here and now. Gints Gabrāns is the only one - he's an artist all the time. In Asia, for those three months, I was an artist. In Riga, you can't free yourself and enter your feelings. You can't open your perception. After all, Riga is where life's happening. There's an old man drinking beer, or there's Miks Pētersons driving past. But I don't want to photograph in Riga. Maybe at five o'clock in the morning in springtime, when you have an empty setting with a surreal aspect to it.It can only be compared to your first love, this experience of the first trip. So I certainly want to return to Laos. Even to approach with apprehension this first love that's already tainted, because time goes on, the emotions change, and Laos is now tainted with tourism. Tourism corrupts, although it seems impossible to corrupt a Lao. Another story about shaving "The wooden stool is empty. We exchange glances, and it's clear that it's time to have my hair shaved off. Finally and completely. In spite of the man's efforts, the shaving turns out to be a painful process. The barber grazes the back of my head with his shaver, while I sit on the stool, clenching my teeth. In half an hour, the torture is over. The old Lao man exchanges the shaver for a brush and compensates for my trials with long and careful grooming of my scalp. Finally, a touch of Lao whiskey, which serves instead of shaving lotion. The man removes his mask of earnestness and smiles, showing a row of great white teeth." (Mārtiņš Grauds, "Dienvidāzijas pikniks", Rīgas Laiks, February 2001) Light, texture and subject - My picture is what makes me stop. I seek three things: texture, light and the subject. When they all come together, then I have my picture. If you've got light and texture, then the subject, too, will appear at some point: and what a subject! In Asia, I'm consciously seeking a picture; all the time I have that rectangle in my head, the composition. In my teens, I watched a lot of music videos and read music magazines, and then, along with translating the song lyrics and raving about the music, you're unconsciously also studying the composition of the photographs. You study the postures in the pictures, the way each person is standing and why they hold particular objects, and then perhaps you try to repeat a photograph. With time, you get a feel for it, and then you're able to visualize objects and their relationships by analogy. I like using only a single lens. This forces you to approach the subject, which, in turn, leads to communication, and that in itself is fantastic. And if you move close up, rather than shooting from a distance like a sniper, you also obtain an understanding of events and things surrounding you. If you adapt to what you're photographing and approach it with piety and respect, then it also becomes a model of the way you live. Ha, ha, that was a nice way of putting it... Well, it's true that I don't like stealing pictures, from a distance, casually. If it's a portrait, then I go up and ask whether I can take a picture, and if necessary, then I'm willing to pay. In this way, the person looks with sincerity towards the camera. Sometimes I see that there's someone sitting in a great pose: I don't want to interrupt, and in such cases I take a snapshot, in passing, as it were. Then you have to sacrifice the composition. Out of twenty such pictures, only one is likely to work. The dictionary of all languages - In Asia, if the locals don't speak English, then it's best talking to them in Latvian and augmenting your words with gestures. Using my native language and gesturing is the most direct way to communicate. On the other hand, if you need to shake someone off, then Russian will work every time. In the sacred grove - For Latvians, the cemetery is a taboo, meditative setting, a sphere that advertising and promotions have imperceptibly breached. This tells a great deal. For example, that originally the vases placed here were stolen. And in an instant, cemetery culture and advertising in the cemetery become linked. You might say I grew up in the cemetery. Grandma took me for walks in the cemetery by the bridge over the railway, and I learned to read early: she taught me to read the inscriptions on the gravestones. Thus, I could read already at the age of three. Then, once, quite by accident, I was taking a walk in Aglona Cemetery and chanced to notice an empty Fantastika lemonade bottle that was being used to hold flowers. And then it all came together. It's such a powerful feeling, when you come to understand that you've opened the way to a whole series of photographs; that there's potential for a whole year of activity! Then I started visiting the cemeteries in Riga, and also in various parts of Latgale. On one such trip, I visited 40 cemeteries, at least five a day. It's a very calm process. It's not as if you rush into the cemetery and begin "collecting" shots one after another. A walk in a cemetery is relaxing: you're granting yourself a relaxing stroll. I also made rules for myself - I wouldn't touch any of the jars, I'd leave the light to fall the way it was falling... Did you know that in the Madona area they don't put up gravestones? They have sort of Latvian Zen gardens: each one with its own area of raked sand, stones and a cross. The people know who's buried there, and strangers don't need to know. Then you seek something special for your collection, and it's really great when you succeed in getting it. For example, near the Lithuanian border, there are bottles of Aura lemonade in the cemeteries, all with amazing promotional texts: "every fourth bottle wins a prize" and "for all the family". Then there was "Social Exhibitionism", and it seemed to me that the idea behind the exhibition would go together well with this series - things seem to converge for me in this way. When I showed an English curator the pictures, she was baffled, since the text about the lottery, for example, is in Latvian, and the idea doesn't come across automatically. I think it's sincere and satisfying to have something very local like that. I'd like to publish this series, too, in a book, and I could add to it. It's great that you can do it in any season of the year. There's still a great deal left to do. And then Jānis Deinats called me a cemetery photographer. I'm a cemetery photographer and a forest director: my most recent music videos are on the subject of forest. That's because I grew up in the cemetery and at the puppet theatre: my father was the director of the Puppet Theatre. I messed about backstage, where the dolls and things are stored, and to my mind there's something here: it seems to me that everyone's an animal. It's clear, for example, that a stork is never going to get along with a raccoon. It's quite enough that they respect each other. The animal theme is broad and flexible, and lasting. I like it, and I'm thinking of working in this direction. Maybe it'll turn out to be something as big as the cemetery project. Grauds breathing - Of course, it's fun travelling around with projects, but if you want to do an honest piece of work, then it's important to gather it all around your own hearth. When you travel, you're inhaling, and then at some moment you exhale, and it's important that you exhale beside your own hearth, among your own kind. And you mustn't pollute the screen, which is already polluted with superfluous information, so you need to observe a certain rhythm. For example, I make one music video a year, and include in it the things I've accumulated and that seem interesting to me. It's similar with exhibitions. I've never had a solo exhibition. Now I have a few pictures in the "Casablanca" club, but that's not really an exhibition. You might say that my first solo exhibition was in the Pulkvedis club: two of my photographs are pasted on the wall of the women's toilets there. I take part if I have work to show. You can be an artist even if you produce some work only once in five years. You don't have to express a view on the occasion of every collective effort, simply in order to affirm that "I too have some thoughts". The cotton robe - My Asian training has also helped me notice things. I don't know if I'd have noticed the cemeteries, had I not been to Asia. Just imagine: you're walking down the street in some town in Laos, and there's a local woman coming towards you. Suddenly you're completely taken aback, your edifice collapses before your eyes, and you can't fathom what's going on. Because she's wearing the same kind of cotton robe as my mother wore in Melluži when I was two. In a single moment, you get such a sensation, such a stratum of memories... the smell of Jūrmala, a newly-painted floor, the train thundering somewhere in the background... Laos was part of the Soviet zone of influence, and the same things were imported over there. And nowhere else, never in your life could you have had such an experience. In Riga, watching videos and looking at photos in the "Casablanca" - Nowadays, there's a tendency for the directors of commercials to get into filmmaking, but the danger lies in the fact that the advertising people have trained their abilities in the short distance - from 30 seconds up to a minute. So, what are you going to do for the remaining hour and twenty-two minutes? A marathon is not the same as the short distance. There are certain mise-en-scenes and acting successes, but there's nothing with which to fill in all the rest. In that case, it's better to make music clips, preferably of the no-budget kind. Maybe it's a matter of counterbalancing the feeling I get when making commercials, where all the processes are not completely under your control, since it's a collective effort, while the music video gives me complete freedom. It's the same setting. The things that are not done in advertising you can do in music videos. You can work truthfully and absolutely. In advertising, too, I work conscientiously, but the ideas I implement are not my own. I like being able to do many things not permitted in advertising. If you've noticed, many things in my videos are like moving photographs. TV provides the possibility of presenting a photograph that's alive and moving. See: forest and animals again... And here's the Radio NABA advert and the "Song about the school pupil" we did with Roberts Gobziņš. If you work with music lasting slightly over three minutes, then in making the video, you have to listen to it more than 300 times. You have to obtain an intuitive feel for it, and if you don't like the music, then it's hell. I've made this mistake a couple of times, so I know what it means. Of course, I like an element of punk in music; I don't go in for commercial projects. I really like what Jānis Žilde is doing. He's putting out an album with his own money. I made the cover for it, using one of these concepts: empty places in Riga. In Riga, you can't afford to go out and photograph the way you can in Asia, where you arrive and gradually enter a certain kind of feeling, for example, after you've been there a month or three months. Over here, you can only work with ... concepts, perhaps? Some idea you think through and then go out and implement. I liked the exhibition in Moscow about Soviet-era underwear. There was a project about bodily memory: impressions left on the skin by underwear that has just been removed. This work of mine is something of this kind: places where houses once stood, which have left marks on the adjacent buildings reflecting the form of the house. There's the sense of home, the sense of the neighbour who's gone. The Moscow district of Riga is still full of such places. A story about a typical Grauds music video "Ksenija: We were filming for a whole 24 hours in the village of Ance, not far from Ventspils. Nearby is a vast forest cutting. The director of the video is Mārtiņš Grauds, also the author of the idea behind the video, on an ecological theme (tree-felling). There are two plot lines: in the first, we all stand and play, and in the second a little spruce tree runs around, fleeing from the axe... We were also helped by a team from Lithuania that provided the lights. We ourselves lugged the equipment through the forest." (Jānis Žilde, in an interview with the band The Movies on the internet portal www.tvnet.lv.) Tuesday evening, "I'm in the moss" - I don't really like to call myself a photographer. Bendiks, Grants or Deinats are photographers, just as Gabrāns is an artist. Mārtiņš Grauds, videoclip director, I sometimes say. Likewise, I can't say I'm a DJ, for example. But on Tuesdays at 23.00 I play music on Radio NABA. We decided on the title together with Roberts Gobziņš. I said I was thinking of the word "moss", and that I needed a kind of feeling. So we got "I'm in the moss". Of course, it's not commercial and I don't get paid for it, but it's nice to be able to play music that's important to you and to share what you have - and it's a major responsibility. Perhaps people hear it when they've just flown into town, perhaps a couple making love in a car will hear it, perhaps someone's opened a window at home in the country or is sitting in the garden... "I'm walking in a forest, along a forest path, with trees all around, and under the trees there's moss. I'm in the moss." My programme is based on a feeling, not a concept. Here I'm free of any conceptualism. No kind of "necro-" theme is implied here. Not to be on stage - Did I want to be a rock star in my childhood? I did want to be an actor, but a rock star... Of course, like most people at a certain age, I've stood in front of a mirror holding a deodorant bottle or drummed with sticks on a suitcase. It's a particular role, the rock star, one that you can imagine. But music has always been there. It's similar with acting: I've always been more interested in directing than in performing. Back in the days of the Zvaigznīšu brīdis radio programme, we had a band called "Ideal Institute". We put together one song, submitted it in a competition and never actually got a chance to perform it in concert, because we'd submitted it too late. "A stands for ass, B - for nothing, C - for ceiling and D's just the same thing"... Some kind of blues. SMS from Mārtiņs Grauds. 17 July, 20:32. "On influences: I think books (e.g. Daniil Harms), music (e.g. "Joy Division") and films (e.g., Leos Carax), between them, have in their time been of more help than any particular photographer..." Getting out of Cambodia - That particular moment had arrived when I had to fly to Riga, and I'd imagined I'd be able to get a Thai visa at the border. It was during the Olympic Games, and the border guards were watching Thais boxing: the Americans versus the Thais. The Thais were being hammered, so the Thai border guards were irate. They look at the passport, with no visa: "Latvia? There's no place like that". You're out of money, but they send you back to the capital, Phnom Penh to get a visa there and then cross the border. You've got barely enough money to reach the capital, or maybe not even that far, and you can beat your head against the wall, but that won't help. You can rant and rave about your predicament, but for how long? Then, amazingly, it all comes out right. I call Riga, confirm that there's money being wired to me, and then arrange a cheap ferry across the river. There I find a very cheap hotel, so that I even end up saving money. I buy a bottle of whiskey and in the morning, with a light hangover, I get on the ferry and travel back to the village in which I know there's a bank where I'll be able to use my card to get money and get to Phnom Penh, where, in turn, I'll get my visa. Aboard the ferry, I meet a Scottish guy, who tells me that they have public holidays here at the moment: everything's closed for four days, like our long Midsummer holiday. The Scottish guy lends me some dollars, I get to Phnom Penh and stay at a guesthouse I'd been to before along with a Norwegian acquaintance, living on credit, while at the same time I'm checking out possibilities of getting cash, and on the third day it turns out that it's possible right there in the hotel, at an exorbitant rate. Now all I have to do is buy my airplane ticket. I live it up in the company of the Norwegian, pay all my debts and then, just as happy as I was distressed at not getting into Thailand, I travel to the airport on a run down motorcycle. Then you come to understand that there's a way out of any situation, and that if there's no way out, then the game's up. In all other cases, there's always a way out. Something extreme at the end - I've begun an enjoyable collaboration with Vides filmu studija ("Wildlife and Environmental Film Productions"), called "En route with the camera". It'll be a new series in which anyone will be able to travel and film. We're looking for a Latvian Senkevich, in order to create a kind of Latvian "Travellers' Club"... No, no, it won't be me: I'm too young and green. I have to wait for my hair to fall out, and I need some kind of education, because Senkevich was, after all, a doctor. But it'll give me a chance to travel more, and I don't yet have any experience with classic TV documentary film, so it'll be interesting to see what comes of it, how much you can do in the limited time available. At least twice a year it'll give me the chance to go abroad, to develop my personal style, to make the transition from advertising to documentary style. I can do commercials for another three to five years. After that there has to be a transition. In "En route with the camera" I'll be one of many. For example, there'll also be a guy thinking of sailing on the Baltic Sea in a storm and filming the storm from the inside. For him that's nothing extreme, but it probably would be for me. If you were to ask whether I'd like to climb Everest, then I have to say I like walking in the mountains. It's enjoyable, and it's pleasant to know you've been climbing a mountain for eight hours; it gives you a completely different feeling when you're looking at the mountain landscape, but to struggle upwards centimetre by centimetre in all that snow - that's not for me. I get my greatest pleasure in communicating with people I meet in an alien environment. Once I didn't have the chance to talk to anyone for four days. The drivel, the verbal diarrhoea that emerges after such a four-day silence! Communication comes very easily to me: I like chatting, and when travelling you're well aware that you're meeting this person for the first and last time. The less carefully you prepare for a journey, the more consciously you're prepared for conversation. The more prepared you are and the more you know, the more self-sufficient you are, but that excludes the element of surprise. Hi, Juris... Yes, it is stuffy here. But it's cooler in the basement! You see how it happens: over here, we also exchange information in this way. We've all met here in the café, we're all hot and we're looking for something better. Earlier, you said it's cooler downstairs, and I'm passing on this information. Likewise, when travelling, there's an exchange of information about what's going on and where. My travels aren't as extreme as they sound. It's not as if I were travelling by boat in the jungle, alone for three weeks, unkempt and eating a snake that had attacked me. The first time, I myself was surprised at how easy it is. You only have to make a certain effort. And then, suddenly, you're over there. I have crawled into caves, and perhaps that's extreme for me, because I don't feel very comfortable in caves. It's really silly - crawling into a cave, where it's dark, wet and claustrophobic. In Laos, together with an Australian and, if I remember correctly, a Dutchman, we learned of a cave near a village, where the Lao had hidden during air raids. We go to the place and look around. Then we go in. There's a narrower cave inside, where you have to make some effort to crawl in, but you can see it's going to get deeper. The Dutchman stays behind, but the Australian and I, we go on. Quite logically, he's unwilling to go on, while we, for some strange reason, do want to. Then there are stalactites, and you have to crawl on your knees, and then you see further passageways. You mark your route and you see old tin cans left by the Lao. You crawl on your knees, and then the spiders start. They jump. Actually they're fleeing, rather than jumping on you. It's unpleasant, but positive - a kind of first zone of fear. We proceed further, and then the burrows begin: I don't know what mountain snake burrows look like, but these certainly do look as if they could be mountain snake burrows. There are more and more of them, and then we turn back. Perhaps we should've overcome this zone of fear, too, because it'd have been amazingly beautiful further on and we'd have gotten our prize - I do believe that there is a kind of balance. But it can also be ridiculous. Once I was climbing a mountain together with a Frenchman, in order to get an amazing view. We climbed up, and found we were surrounded by fog, as it was with Jarmusch... I don't know whether things like this can be called extreme, or whether they're just plain stupid. Now - Here I'm playing games with myself and with objects surrounding me. And there are self-portraits. It'll come in useful somewhere! Sometimes I can pick up the mobile phone and write a poem based on the names of the functions, such as "silent default exit meeting". Advertising has trained my head to use the information around me. It's all very contemporary, all happening now, and you've got to react very fast, preferably with maximum feeling. Never - Once I dreamt I was standing in a long queue of people at an official reception held by the president. There are various characters, as in the "The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie". They each come up and, as in the Mr Bean episode, each one takes a step forward, shakes hands and introduces himself. All of them know very well who they are and are able to say it properly. Then it's my turn: the president comes up, smiles warmly, shakes my hand, and in my dream I'd decided that I was going to say "Mārtiņš Grauds, videoclip director", but in fact I end up saying "Mārtiņš Grauds, clip clap". | |
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