Here, each print disturbs, disturbs, or hypnotizes, and it is this cocktail of sensations that makes the bodies vulnerable yet powerful, making it a work of beauty and emotion. Published by the independent publishing house Loose Joints, this book is a sensory meditation on the fall of bodies, transformation, and freedom. At the end of the book, Rodriguez says, “O. is a sound, a vibration, a breath, an echo chamber, a cry that shakes the earth, a collective lament, a new beginning—our symphony.”
The title, O. , is an open enigma: a letter, a circle, a beginning without end, an erasure. “Between the noises, a breath, an exhalation, a cycle, all the sounds, an open symbol, a zero, a reset,” tracing a link between formal abstraction and spiritual symbolism. “What if it were possible to suddenly stop time in the middle of freefall? What if, in the midst of this crash, in this vertical descent, we could readjust our momentum and change the course of our trajectory?” imagines Rodriguez.
He seeks this fall in the details of the body, in its vanishing points, its flaws, its bodily features transformed by the force of gravity. “The people in these pages embody this cry bodily—between perseverance and resignation. They are bodies collapsing. An overwhelming energy coming from outside has transformed their perception of space.” Influenced by the mystical thought of Simone Weil, he questions the tension between suffering and transcendence, identity and destiny .
The photographs, all in black and white, provoke multiple emotions. Bodies of varying ages, origins, and morphologies appear in a choreography of poses that are both expressive and vulnerable. Bulging muscles surrender, faces tense, hands seek a grip, wrinkles and the marks of life are sublimated. Each image is a pause in a wild dance, a freeze frame, a frozen movement. “How much control do we have over the direction we take? And how soft will the landing be?” asks Rodriguez, whose camera becomes an extension of the inner gaze.
Added to these photographs of bodies are images of tasseography—the divinatory art of reading coffee grounds—a nod to the artist’s Dominican roots. This dialogue between the tangible and the invisible, between the body and fate, anchors O. in a territory where the spiritual meets the intimate. Some photographs recall prayer or ecstasy, as if each model were undergoing a spiritual ordeal. The book is above all an object of great sensuality. It reminds us that photography, like dance, can be a gesture of liberation for the body, a space of transcendence.
O . by Luis Alberto Rodriguez published by Loose Joints, May 2023.
