Photos, authors and fashions

After Petrópolis, only one word resonated in the team: overcoming. How to face the story of these two women and this emblematic house? How to move forward without repeating oneself? How to make the colors and silhouettes speak again?

 - Look!" said Martina, who knows me like no one else, dropping a pile of photography books on the table and making me return, with a shock, from my trip to the tree in front of me. - Always traveling... - she murmurs, and reminds me of my elementary school teacher.

- I'm coming - I answer, sigh and dive in.

I must admit that I have a hard time with beginnings, like writers when they finish one book and must move on to the next. A funambulist thread links one collection to the next. The desire to be already pouring inspiration, taming it, applying it to rules of confection and dyeing, relating ideas, to finally innovate, merge with the emptiness left by the previous trip.

The laziness of starting to climb can only be overcome with the certainty that at some point the climb will turn into adrenaline and the dome, the greatest prize, will be the pleasure of contemplating the finished collection.

But to get to this point, you have to work hard. To face the blank sheet of paper again. To look, to talk, to explore, to discuss...

 

That's where we were with the whole team, engaged in a bibliographic crusade: browsing through books of stories, photos, authors and fashions, looking for that spark that would start a new autumn-winter collection.

And it happened. 

It was like a bolt of lightning. I closed the book.

- What is it? What happened?

I couldn't answer because I couldn't find the thread to start pulling from.

The closing of the book had been so abrupt that it had cut off all the threads of thought in the meeting room. Joaquín tore the book he was still holding out of my hands and began to turn pages in search of some sign. 

It was entitled "Poolside with Slim Aarons". Women and men of the show business of the 60's were photographed in their American mansions. They were images that movies had always reproduced for us.

 - Which one, Manuela? - asked Sofia.

Now everyone was surrounding the copy. Joaquín's fingers were stumbling, not knowing what he was looking for. I, with my eyes closed, was tangled in the words that did not appear, and in the order of events that did not emerge either.

Martina took my hands and the contact with her eyes brought me back to the present.

- There is a house, in California... - I could say. 

- This one? - Sofia asked me, showing me the page that had made me jump. I knew the image.

- Yes, the Kaufmann house - I said. - I have been there.

Slim Aarons' photograph reproduced a full-page image of two women conversing in front of a swimming pool. The house was crowned by cliffs, which in the distance anticipated the surrounding desert. It bore the name "Poolside Gossip".

And the questions began, the interrogation of my team and, with it, my journey to a corner I thought forgotten. They began to arrive in gushes, with pauses, holes and disorder. They were fragments of experiences, of moments, of photos stored in the attic of memory and that when developed brought with them colors and sensations that seemed new for the time they had remained dormant.

I sat up. I took a deep breath and scanned my team with my eyes. 

- I'm going to tell you a story," I said, and began to travel, this time with the word, back to California.