Photographers

"The “have-nots” see agonizing death as an equalizing force. Their pompous attitude is unfair and their only advantage over us. Recently, I’ve come to resent them, to resent karma. ...I understood when Zombie died. I understood when Monica died. What I can’t understand is why I have to die at such a young age. It just doesn’t make sense. The only question I have is … WHY ME?"

"A couple walked past us holding hands. “You guys look so cute playing football in the park.” Little did they know that they just witnessed the biggest Super Bowl loss in the history of National League Football."

"He was soon asleep as the familiar cadence of Bach played in the background. It was no surprise that no one noticed."

"A noted psychologist, who witnessed one of Mary Wellington’s desperate episodes, wrote about her in one of his articles. “Mary X’s behavior is symbolic of a gross narcissism that doesn’t allow anyone in their world except themselves. If there were a cure for this parasitic ailment, it would lead to world peace. Our modern technological society has inadvertently created the Mary X’s of the world, and our civilization suffers as a result. God help us all.”"

"Magic gave a final wink and wave as it vanished into the cascading darkness of the dark lonely back road."

"Right now, at this very moment, we are at that point in time where the dream dies and reality takes its place. We are the only ones that can appreciate that moment, because we are the only ones who know it. This is a future moment happening right now. Don’t you get it Jason, then is now. In a few minutes, the present reality we are experiencing will be gone; the dream will have ended because it became reality. All of these stratums of reality, the multiplicity of cascading sheets of our world are about to morph, and shift, and sort, all in one small single point in time."

"Jason never knew a day without war. They raged since before he was born, and had become a silent backdrop to his everyday life. As long as it stayed in the big cities, he was satisfied to remain deaf, dumb and blind to the destruction."

"History is a perfect arm-chair coach, but it lacks human sentiment. It’s like imagining living through the Black Death in the Middle Ages. It can’t be done. Essentially history is an emotional iceberg when it comes to human tragedy. We look upon the events of history as folklore, stories of human rights and wrongs, of character and cracks. History is always a good story, but its tragedies or success never hit our current-event nerve."

"Human nature is very myopic about its existence. It very much wants to think their current reality is the absolute reality."

"What they [the Cactus Bristle gang] discovered is that people were not influenced by principles, such as the difference between democracy and communism, Judaism versus Islam, or even rich versus poor. They found people did not generally comprehend or like abstract principles. All people wanted was a place they called their own, a good job, and the ability to make life decisions with ample access to television."

"My wife is talking to me this morning without realizing that her words go into my ears and drop directly to my toes. I hear their thud as they land and maybe a small wisp of air as they pass my brain. ...I need her to understand that the alligator in my head is eating the meaning of her words as my toes become crammed with their debris. She will still yell at me, but I have a good excuse now that I have an alligator residing in my head."

"I need to wake out of my stupor and begin work. ...my body stands frozen in a snow packed tundra waiting for rescue. It may take a few days before that happens, since my mind is on vacation in Alberta right now."

"Monday could not have arrived on a worse day. It could have been polite and waited until Tuesday or even Wednesday."

"Crap is the essence of innovation and technological advancement. ...It’s our human way of becoming … well … generators of more crap that helps us become more modern, productive and communicative human beings."

"Meditation takes chaos and begins magically morphing it into nothing."

"Aesthetics is merely an undiscovered force, expressed by a yet un-devised mathematical equation."

"All my inner beings become streams of brightly lucent colors. I touch each strand and each thread makes a unique tone."

"My wife says that I should be working for retirement instead of pursuing my sizzled dream of writing. I told her she was right. I should be working instead of goofing off. But, I’m a man. What does she expect?"

"Today is my last full day at the ocean. ...Perfection is not only for the rich, the supremely talented, the powerful. It is also available to me."

"Luck is for the poor. For the rich, money flows to its natural source. ...You know, it’s true what they say. Life is a beach!"

"I like to commemorate my trips with a localized t-shirt. I re-live my trips throughout the year, saying to myself that I am not trapped in a dungeon of incessant work because I go on vacations and have t-shirts to prove it."

"I learned how to work on automatic pilot over the years. It takes a lot of practice to keep a wife calm. I’ve actually become a wife-whisperer during my 32 years of marriage."

"The ocean is an intoxicant or more like WD40. It greases the rusty parts of the mind and body and gets them moving like a precision machine."

"The sequel would catapult me into the New York Times #1 book for 18 months straight. I would not allow my stardom to affect my Zen-Monk demeanor. I would retire into my mansion, become a Zen-Monk master and own three Jeeps."

"I don’t like jumping in the ocean and pretending to be a fish. I don’t surf and I don’t enjoy swimming. ...I don’t enjoy fishing either. I must come from a line of beasts that lived on the beach but not in the ocean."

"Reducing the consumption flow by rich people taking all the money is fun (if you’re rich) … at least for a while. ...In ten years, a new consumer class must emerge to continue to the devouring trend of consumption. IF NOT, the top falls from its own weight. The top dogs of global economic market cannot munch their way through product consumption to keep the show going. The result … CRASH!"

"The pivotal element is TIME POVERTY."

"The amount of time it takes to provide is threefold for families whom have to make due with very little. … Children from poor households learn to have very low expectations of themselves and their future because they believe that the world around them doesn't expect much from them either. In India, children of the lower castes are taught still today that once poor always poor so they don't think to become doctors or lawyers because their last name may not be Gupta or whatever other typically higher caste name there may be in India."

"When I am in India I gravitate to the poor and forgotten; in the fields I love photographing the workers who eek out a living and a little bit of food from the earth. All of this has everything to do with this area, as Western New York has many people working in the fields as migrant families."

"I make images of the living for the living. I try to celebrate life. Iconic photographer Dorothea Lange, once said ‘I too have come to lend my voice to those least able to have a voice of their own.’ I agree."

"There can never be too many of us doing this type of work … The work that we do is necessary beyond accolades or honors. In fact, to do it for accolades or honors alone is criminal. I am my brother’s keeper, may I always behave as such!"

"I'm more likely to come in after the newspapers and television cameras have long disappeared from the scene post-disaster. The people I gravitate to are neither rich nor popular. They do not have the power to boost or end careers at the flick of a pen; nor do they own fancy things or drive fancy cars. These people live in slums and muddle trough piles of waste and trash on their way home to a little shack, which they share with a throng of other family members. Outside the cacophony of worldwide charitable organizations, their struggles are rarely suitable topic for common everyday talk."

"I don’t need them to tell me what it feels like to be poor … I already know how this feels, how it smells and how it tastes! When I talk to them … I want them to tell me about their hopes and aspirations, about their dreams… about the road ahead and how they imagine it will shape up out in front of them to make the dreaming and hoping come true. I ask them about assistance, about the health, and about their families near or far."

"Even when someone from the lower financial caste in, say America, "makes it," then there is this other barrier of old money vs. new money, social status, respected family names vs. unsavory familial relations or even ethnic background that makes the entire journey of achievement suddenly turn sour and seemingly not have been worth the while. My question here is why do we humans keep doing this to each other or to ourselves? Why do we think so little about the role of humanity and of kindness? In my opinion, if we believe in a higher being, there is only one God and he/she is neither you nor me. The sooner we begin this process of healing as people, all people, the sooner we can begin to live a mutual life free from innuendo, hurt, judgment and need."

"Life is pretty rough for the nearly 400 million people in India who still live on $2 USD or less a day-they are mostly what this show is about. In America by comparison, the children of the poor may not have access to the latest Dolce & Gabbana or Armani suit, but they at least predominantly have shelter, even though it may not be a castle but it is a warm place to rest and recuperate. So many of the children I come across in such countries as India live and sleep with their families on the street covered by a tarp or a piece of plastic or cardboard. They cry themselves to sleep at night from hunger. We are very lucky to be living in the U.S. and not there under similar conditions in a country like India, even if being poor here means living simply. If we as people can remember this much from seeing one of my shows, then we are already well on the way toward progress in my opinion."

"Maybe by doing this work and putting my name on the front line, like a science project, will also afford me the opportunity to embarked into a very special opportunity to show that growing up poor doesn't have to mean being unworthy or forgettable. This is a very important lesson for those who propagate such narrow minded universally accepted inaccuracies about poverty."

"Showing poverty is such a large part of my work because another thing that I am finding is that for me personally, doing this work helps me in trying to come to grips with my own upbringing and all that occurred during that time. Basically, this work to me is a sort of time for reflection, a pseudo inventory of "this is your life," a way to try to accept the concept of what was so inevitable."

"What is palpable and distinctive about Rivera-Ortiz’ photographs is their profound humanity. The heart knows. And Rivera-Ortiz’ heart instructs him to recognize in a street corner of a remote village, the universal within the specific. He sculpts out of the landscape a look, a sky, a river, spices on the roadside, mother and child, a man missing an arm. Manuel Rivera-Ortiz makes it possible for us to journey with him and see what is not always readily apparent to the human eye. He goes beyond recording these simple truths. He has the courage to first experience them as his own, and then the will to bring them home to the rest of us—a compelling invitation to open up our own hearts."

"Manuel Rivera-Ortiz’s photographs of people living in poor villages in Turkey and Thailand, Bolivia and India don’t falsely romanticize their subjects’ poverty nor do they explicitly critique the political or economic systems that create such conditions. By focusing purely on the people who populate the poor global villages he visits, he captures the entire range of human emotion: mistrust, fear, curiosity, friendliness, happiness. Social critique may simmer below the surface of his work, but the primary message of Rivera-Ortíz’s images seems to be that hope and creativity are not mutually exclusive to poverty."

"Manuel Rivera-Ortiz's Cuba series, is like a cinema verité journey, through a landscape both accessible and mythic. His panoramas capture a connection to an environment that prods the senses. One feels enveloped by a familiar, primal place. It is this place which will hopefully anchor a vibrant social order, as it braces itself for the tremors gathering momentum on the horizon. The engaging photograph of two little girls holding each other, surrounded by lush vegetation, workers and family members speak to the continuity and bonds of love and vision of one’s own paradise."

"In the US we can buy comfort or clean water as needed. In India they cannot even when they do have the money as the country right now is going through a terrible drought as they are in other places around the world such as Australia as I understand it. We are a bit spoiled here no matter how much money we have or don't have. I really hope people will enjoy seeing "Manuel Rivera-Ortiz: India" there at El Museo. I really hope that those that do feel comfortable and free to contact me and share their stories, ideas or suggestions, do. I too do not ever pretend operate in a vacuum. This work is done on all of our behalf."

"Paparazzi were loitering in increasing numbers with their high-tech cameras and intrusion drones, a sure sign that a scandal was suspected."

"The very real and present risk associated with being pursued as a celebrity pales in comparison to the daily, imminent danger to the public at large...The person being followed knows there is wanton carelessness behind them. The pedestrian crossing the street, or the car expecting to have the right of way does not. A severe accident occurring from this kind of vehicular pursuit is not a theoretical possibility, but a situational certainty."