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Guillermo
Ortega's first experience as a photographer happened
in 1968, when he was 24 years old. He had a used
Laica bought at a Pawnshop in Los Angeles, California,
traveled to New Orleáns where he would
embark in a Chilean flag cargo carrier named Maule
to Peru, after a permanency of almost five years
in the USA.
In
those days didn't exist a fast way of obtaining
information. There was, however, the easiness
of finding books - as it even happens today -
about the more varied and possible matters even
those that seemed impossible too. For five dollars,
Ortega bought a manual in a Los Angeles' bookstore
"How to travel cheap toward South America".
Strachan Shipping Company was the name of the
company that represented the Chilean ship in New
Orleáns. Finally he could return to his
country taking three enormous trunks of books
that he wouldn't leave by no means in the USA.
The fee for a cabin with bathroom and four meals
daily during ten days, the time the voyage was
programmed to delay from New Orleáns, USA
to Callao, Peru, was eighty American dollars exactly.
While
visiting the city of New Orleáns, Ortega
was impressed with its beauty, the French and
African influence as well as the Port's nearby
poor neighborhoods. When photographing in one
of them, it seemed a resident didn't like his
visit with a camara in hands and to express his
annoyance of seeing somebody registering the place
poverty, he showed his primitive side with in
that moment incomprehensible physical aggression
that ended up by destroying the camera.
From
that first incursion, rested only four negatives
that miraculously didn't get lost: The four pictures
reproduced in the New Orleans' page.
Later
on, and with no setback, in 1972, Ortega traveled
to the former USSR, invited by the government
of that country and he devoted to register methodically
with a 72 shots Minolta his visit to Moscow, Tashkent
and to the millennial Samarcanda, in the programmed
time.
Thanks
for your visit and if you happen to have any information
regarding the exposed pictures, please send it
or any commentary on the matter that Guillermo
Ortega will be deeply grateful for the information.
Credits on the pictures shall be given to you
after all, one may not forget that many years
have passed by so far. (Salvador da Bahia, Brazil,
September 2004).
...................................................Email:
mitortega@gmail.com
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