Cesar Vasquez Altamirano - Et Cetera 1
Et Cetera One is a collection of street photographs shot in London by Cesar Vasquez Altamirano. I discovered Cesar’s work on Instagram in 2020, before the pivot to video screwed everything up and made it impossible to surface work by artists not talking into the camera on their story trying to sell you light room presets or workshop passes to show you how to photograph someone in NYC walking out of a deep shadow. This episode brought to you by MPB! If I recall, Cesar was generous enough to pay international shipping to do a trade for one of my own noisy little zines.
I have a bit of a tough relationship with street photography, it’s a category of picture making that really possessed me and made me feel really on fire to go out and make work. I spent a long time feeling like no picture was ever good unless it had a person in the frame doing something, looking interesting. It took me until the COVID lockdowns to take the blinders off and try to move past such a rules based approach to making pictures. It’s a genre I’ve often felt like repudiating, but looking at publications like this one reminds me what is so exciting about street photography.
Like a lot of photographers I was really animated by the Are Bure Boke style, and you can see that in Cesar’s work too, there’s plenty of off-kilter frames and shutter speed blur, figures silhouetted in deep deep shadow. What really stand out to me are the characters, like the Amazonians on the cover, the Halloween’d skeletonized man walking home with his groceries, the woman with the giant frames pursing her lips as a camera is shoved in her face. There are some beautiful chance arrangements as well- a man just visible emerging from the vestibule of a building, looking down and pensive as a woman walks by, or my favorite spread in the book, a picture of a pair of hands holding a camera with the body of the photographer wielding it concealed by a great marble pillar, and Cesar’s own shadow projected past it. One of the many rules of street photography: Don’t photograph people’s backs, is violated artfully throughout- demonstrating the dramatic flowing fabrics of trench coats, the symmetry of twinned polka dot hats.
This zine is printed very beautifully, my scanner doesn’t do it justice. I also love that Cesar chose not to print a cover, and to save the title and publication information for the center fold, I like the idea of a zine like this as a demo tape, for someone to have to flip through to the middle to figure out who’s work they’re looking at, not giving it up on the front page. This zine illustrates for me at least the punk qualities that make street photography so animating, the anti-masterpiece quality of snatching ephemeral moments out of thin air.
And I'll confess, I didn't look to see if Cesar's work was online- you can and should view this work and more at the Dmax it deserves on his website -> https://cesarvasquezaltamirano.photos/etceteraone
