dead-bird2There’s a bit of Proust in the young man, that much is certain.  Christian Kummerfeldt, the 21 year old Guatemalan photographer whose work is featured in these pages, is quite purposefully in search of beauty – and consciously fighting to hold on to its memory.

In his words, “…by photographing you can fight forgetting… Looking back at the thousands of shots you accumulate after many years of hunting for epiphanies you finally discover yourself, indirectly and unconsciously through the many obsessions that control your work in infinite ways.”

In the photographs selected here we see a young man concerned with the solitary, the separate and the contemplative while maintaining a sense of both proximity and distance.  Equally as powerfully, Christian is also an artist who maintains a sense of humor, dark though at times it may be.

Old Mr. Proust had one hell of a memory – enough so that he found a few thousand pages of lost time inside a teacup, but his real gift was lending those memories to his readers, giving them ownership of those remembrances.  And, though it is far too weighty a comparison to put on him, Mr. Kummerfeldt might be on the path, as well.

It ain’t as sweet as a madeleine, but the image of the dead songbird above is so vivid that when I look away I swear I can almost remember how I watched it die.

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About the Author

Michael Tallon, Editor-in-Chief, head writer and delivery boy, of La Cuadra Magazine, expatriated from the States 11 years ago. After spending a year in Antigua gasbagging about wanting to start an English Language magazine, he hit the road and wandered about South America, India and Nepal before finding himself sipping tea in Darjeeling and realizing that maybe it was time to head home and pick up the career path. That ill-fated adventure in New York lasted about 6 weeks before he headed back to Antigua, Guatemala, where John Rexer had actually started the magazine in his absence.

After a few months, Mike took over the magazine and has been going slowly broke since. On that note, Mike would like to invite advertisers, readers and potential patrons to send him free money.
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