Fritz Photography

Abraham and his family and staff continue to welcome me with open arms to their coffee beneficio here in Esteli, and I continue to be enchanted by the beautiful light, the rustic building, and the hard-working team.  And so I continue with my photo essay (view the previous post here), a bit of visual poetry from the highlands of Nicaragua:

As always, there’s more to see.  But I’m pleased with this body of images.  You can always view more of my travel and editorial photography and my fine art photography on my other websites.

I spent an afternoon on a local tobacco farm, during harvest, here in Esteli, Nicaragua. While I’m not a proponent of smoking, nonetheless tobacco farming and cigar manufacturing are major enterprises here, and are worthy of investigation. Esteli creates a major part of the cigars manufactured in the world, and grows a rich variety of its own quality cuban-seed tobaccos.

It’s interesting to note the similarities between cigar making and coffee production, both of which are major enterprises in this area. Listening to someone talk about the creation of a cigar–the different types, qualities, and flavors of tobacco leaves; the effects of the sun and different soils and micro-climates; and the combination of different tobaccos to create a cigar–often sounds similar to listening to an expert talk about coffee production and preparation.

Some interesting facts about tobacco production here in Nicaragua:

You’ll see in the photos the massive, wooden galerones, built from scrap wood, that rise up from the ground in sets of 2-4 per tobacco farm. During the different harvests (tobacco leaves are harvested in 3-5 different cuttings, from the bottom of the plant upwards), the harvesters pick the mature leaves by hand, and pile them on their arm. These stacks of leaves are then transferred to wagons, which bring the leaves to the barn. Inside the barn, workers tie the leaves in sets of 4, which are draped over a stick in sets of a dozen. These sticks (“cujes”) are then handed up to men in the rafters of the galerone, who hang them.

This turns into a mind boggling set of statistics:

4 leaves x 12 sets=1 cuja with 48 leaves
Each worker strings around 5,000 cujas per day
The cujas are hung 8 levels high in the galerone
The galerone holds 50,000 cujes
The end result: 2,400,000 tobacco leaves dry for 2 months in the galerone.

Multiply this by 3 galerones=7,200,000 tobacco leaves per crop

Multiply this by 2 crops per year at this farm=14,400,000 tobacco leaves

Each galerone holds 400 quintales (a quintal is 100 lbs) of tobacco=40,000 lbs of tobacco per galerone per crop.

Each worker earns between $3-4/day for their labor.

A note on process: While I love the black and white images in this series, many of these images are wonderful in color as well.  And, of course, there are far more quality images than I could post here.

Tucked away in a barrio in Esteli, Nicaragua, on the edge of a dry, dusty stream bed, is the family-owned coffee processing company of Abraham Enrique Castillo, Beneficio Centro America.

It’s not a large facility, although at one time it was twice its current size, before their land was seized and inhabited by others.  Nor is it a high-tech operation.  But it is a comfortable, homely place, with the delicious aroma of freshly roasted and ground coffee in the air.

Abraham is a gentle, inviting gentleman, getting along in years, but kind and slow-speaking, and easily understood.  He’ll welcome you to his shop, invite you in, and show you around.

If you follow him through the building and out the back door, through a small farmyard of coffee plants and tall trees, inhabited by lounging dogs and clucking chickens, you’ll come to an acre of concrete, strewn with swaths of coffee beans.  It is here that Abraham and his team dry the coffee beans in the sun, until they are ready to be roasted or packaged, depending on the next step in their journey.  The patchwork quilt of coffee varies from green to brown to yellow, depending on whether they’re drying whole beans (ripe or green), or the golden-to-light-green hulled beans.

Abraham steps onto the concrete and makes the rounds, patch to patch, stooping over to slowly to pick up a couple beans, crushing them between his fingers, testing whether or not they’re ready to be brought inside.  Occasionally he’ll gaze up at the clouds in the sky, and mumble about whether it’s going to rain today or not.  When he finds beans that are ready, he points them out to his assistants, and they begin to rake and bag them and bring them indoors.

Inside, they have several machines, some newer, some that look like they’ve been around since the revolution.  With these machines they remove the hulls, sort the beans by size, sort by hand any defective beans or foreign matter (stones, pinto beans, twigs), roast and mill the coffee, and then bag the grounds by hand.  In one corner you may see Abran’s wife, Senora Castillo, sitting at an ancient Singer sewing machine, making sackcloth bags for the coffee.

Like most smaller businesses in Nicaragua, the place of business also serves as the family home.  By midafternoon, everyone is ready for a break, and we are invited into the dim, low-ceilinged dining room to share in a cup of coffee, served in locally hand-crafted mugs, accompanied by sweet-tangy cookies called rosquillas.

The beneficio is a family affair, dim and dusty, stacked with bags of coffee, littered with wooden seats and sorting bins, filled with several generations of memories, and the sweet smell of freshly ground Nicaraguan coffee.

I spent the day today volunteering photography for a local non-profit here in Esteli, Nicaragua, called Instituto de Formacion Permanente.   Among the many things they do in the city and the region, they have a Saturday day camp for children.  I joined them in the city at 8am, and we took a packed bus just past the outskirts of Esteli, to their camp.  (Remember those schoolbuses you and I rode in the 70’s and 80’s?  Well, they migrate south after retirement in the US, and get in a good 20 or more years of service down here in Latin America.)

At the camp, they have two main focuses.  The first period is broken into two groups of younger and older children.  This morning, they spent the time learning about good communication skills, skills that can help improve their relationships at home now and in the future.  After that, we had snacks of a chicken-spread sandwich and a rice drink.  Next, the kids were broken up into interest groups.  This included cooking (they made papaya marmalade), gardening, dancing, English, and paper crafts.  There was also time for sports and relaxing between things.  Finally, we all received a very hearty meal of rez, rice, beans, tortillas, maduros (fried mature plantains), and rice drink.

While INSFOP’s reach is quite large in the region, they have no website, and we’re hoping these images will help them communicate what they do to their supporters, and show them what a great time the kids have in their care.

Alberto Gutierrez could be called many things: hermit, farmer, eccentric, recluse, sculptor, folk artist, walking piece of history, national treasure.  I don’t know that all of these would be accurate descriptions, but I do know this: he is a talkative, friendly fellow, who loves art, loves poetry, and loves his property in Cerro Jalacate, in the hills of Tisey.

Tisey, Nicaragua, is a Reserva Natural, near Esteli, in the North.  It’s an area encompassing 9,344 hectares of mountains and valleys, trees and rivers, and farms and farming coops.

Our friend and guide, Carlos, took us on a day-long trek through part of the Reserva, beginning with breakfast at a coop where they grow organic vegetables with organic fertilizer made from the waste of the organically fed cows and goats, which produce organic milk, from which they make swiss-style cheese.  From there we made the several-kilometer trek to Alberto’s farm, on the side of one of the hills, where he lives with his siblings on their family farm, where he was born in 1944.  Growing coffee, tropical fruits, and other comestibles, they live off of what they grow, and sell the excess for income.

Alberto is an interesting character, and happy to show people around his property.  When we first arrived, he asked us to sign in to his guestbook, which he produced from a shed where he stores coffee and tools.  He told us he’d had over a thousand people visit over the years, and he had their names and dates and countries of origin there in the pages of his books.

After signing in, he invited us to follow him through the hillside covered with coffee bushes, and trees producing orange, lemons, bananas of four different colors, and tiny pineapples.  He told us of the animals that used to live in the forests, such as monkeys and cats, that no longer were around.  Now, he said, there are just squirrels, which eat the oranges on occasion.

We walked along the paths sculpted from the dirt and rock, carved into stairs with wooden handrails, as he began to point out stones that he’d carved into different shapes along the way.  As we proceeded, the side of the path turned more and more to large rock outcroppings, into which he’d carved animals, churches, faces, maps of Nicaragua.  He pointed out the Twin Towers of New York, the cathedral in Esteli, the boats of Christopher Columbus, the cross of Christ.  In some places he’d carved stairs, and in others, benches to sit and enjoy the view of the valley below.  To some sculptures he’d added color, either by paint, or by the color of the stones themselves, pink and gray and white.

I asked him how he made the carvings, and from a niche he’d carved into the rock he pulled two sharpened pieces of rebar, a knife-like blade, and a stone hammer.  He said he’d been using the same tools (except for the stone, which had to be replaced when it broke) for most of his sculpting life.  He showed us the fresh lines he’d carved into the various murals, in his annual fight against fungus, dirt, and decay.

As we proceeded along the face of the hillside, the stone face became taller, the edge beside us steeper, and the themes larger and more colorful.  When we stopped to sit and talk further, we did so at a creche that Alberto had carved from the rock, painted with blue and white paint, complete with the nativity scene and the star of Bethlethem.  Here we sat and rested, while he quoted us poetry from Latin American poets, songs, and some poems of his own.

As we returned along the hillside, he pointed out a lichen-covered Atlas, whom he’d sculpted holding the mountain itself on his back.  It made me wonder who, after Alberto is gone, will uphold the fragile beauty of his fantastical sculptures, hewn into the very bedrock of his country, riddled by wars and revolutions, ravaged by poverty and greed, governed by tyrants and thieves, threatened with drought and disease.   And yet Alberto and his sculptures seem to me an apt representative of the heart of his country.  For here, hidden in the ancient hills, is a symbol of the hope, beauty, and ingenuity of the Nicaraguan people.

Now, here is a man who appreciates his craft.

I’ve spent a few hours in the Nica Libre cigar factory here in Esteli, getting to know the process of cigar making, and photographing it.  While I don’t care for cigars myself, nonetheless, I find the process to be fascinating and the product to be beautiful.  And the folks here in Esteli, Nicaragua, are really friendly.

Check out these beautiful cigars.  They’re made by only one woman in this factory, who has sufficient skill to create them.  I bought several.  If you’re nice to me, I might give you one.

This is the tobacco as it comes from the plantation, to the fabrica.

This young lady puts those pretty labels on the finished cigars.This is Eli, with whom I talked at length about his art and writing.  Nicaraguans are pretty passionate about poetry, and Eli combines poetry with paintings and drawings.  And he manages the little warehouse at the factory, where the cigars are placed for several weeks to ‘finish’ prior to labeling, packaging, and shipment.

I purchased a number of Nica Libre’s lovely cigars, including some made from organic tobacco by local farmers.  The first two lengthy comments (from folks in the Portland area) get a free cigar when I return!

The other day, while photographing in a Nicaraguan cigar factory, I noticed in the courtyard several cages containing exotic animals.  One contained a cat of some sort, perhaps a lynx or bobcat, pacing his 4-foot square cage.  Another contained several parrots.  And the third contained 2 capucin monkeys.

Monkeys are pretty cute creatures, and strangely familiar.  When they came up to the wire mesh and looked right at me, they were peculiarly sad looking creatures; I felt bad for them.

I pulled up my camera and started to photograph, and the monkey started squawking at me, and bounded away to the other side of the cage.  I put the camera down, and he returned.  Again, I hoisted my camera, and he made a face at me, squawked, and jumped away.  Nonetheless, I kept photographing, and a moment later he bounded toward me and threw something at me, hitting my hand and camera.  I thought it was a piece of food or a nut, and thought nothing of it, and continued to photograph.

My wife, who was standing nearby, called out, “He just threw poop at you!”

“Really?”  I replied.  “I just thought it was a nut or a berry.”

“No,” she said, “capucins throw poop.”  She pointed at the clod on the ground below me, saying, “And there it is.”

Well, there was nothing for it but to continue shooting.  I went around to the far corner and continued to photograph the monkeys.  I tend to like to be as close to my subjects as possible, and wouldn’t you know it, the little guy reached through the cage and swatted my lens!  He did so two more times as I continued to photograph.

I can honestly say I’ve never had anyone express their discomfort with having their picture taken as brazenly as this little guy.  Pooed and pawed in the course of two minutes.  What a day.

I love being a photographer.

On the Road Again

So I’m sitting on an American Airlines flight between Dallas and Miami, on the way to Nicaragua, reading Nexos, their Spanish-language in-flight magazine.  After twenty minutes, my head is already spinning, as I try to recall the meaning of words I haven’t studied in 20 years.  I made my way through a third of an article on Mexican basketball, and am pretty proud of myself.

It’s not like I haven’t been practicing.  Since returning from Thailand two weeks ago, I’ve spent about twenty minutes a day with a Spanish CDROM from my mother in law.  Even last night, fighting hard to stay asleep (why is it so hard to sleep when you know you have to get up at 4:15 am?), I found myself practicing Spanish in my head, then telling myself to shut up and go to sleep.

We’re headed to Nicaragua not just for the 95-degree weather and beans and rice, but more importantly, to immerse ourselves in studying Spanish, writing, and photography.  But the idea of four straight hours a day of Spanish class—one on one with a tutor—has me a little nervous.  First of all, I haven’t been in real school in twenty years (I went back and got a fine arts degree 8 years ago…).  I also haven’t studied Spanish in twenty years, since I took a year in high school and two in college.  And, honestly, at 38, I’m finding that my mental cognition is not quite what it used to be.

Two years ago, Shannon and I spent nine days in Zihuatanejo, Mexico with her family, and a close friend, Melissa.  I’d been in Mexico the previous couple of winters for a week of sunshine, but had a hard time getting out more than an hola here and there.  But in Zihua, the minute we arrived at our lodging, I started talking with the clerk in Spanish, asking if he could give us a quieter room.  For some reason, the Spanish just flowed out of me (in a halting, pathetic sort of way), and I took every opportunity I could to speak ith.  In fact, one day, exchanging money at the bank with my friend Melissa, the teller helping me told me that my accent was much better than Melissa’s.  This managed to piss off Melissa to no end, considering that’s she’s fluent in Spanish, and has lived in Central America for years at a time.  I, on the other hand, walked out of the bank glowing.

Encouragement from bank tellers aside, I’m far from fluent.  And what’s more, my wife eats languages for lunch, and has a brain like a magnet.  Every country we visit, she picks up on far more words than I—even surprising our Slovak hosts once by pulling a complete sentence out of nowhere: Dyacuyem za shetko (Thank you for everything).  She dreams in Latin names for plants.  She aces her nursing school tests using words like hydrochlorothiozide, hydrogen ion gradient, and gastrocnemius. She learned rudimentary Spanish on the job at Waremart selling video rentals to Mexican farm workers.  And now I have to go up against her, head to head in one-on-one Spanish study in Nicaragua.

Maybe a little friendly competition will do me good.

Our first stop is Granada, Nicaragua, a colonial Spanish city on the edge of Lake Nicaragua.  If you can stand the constant 98-degree weather, it is an interesting place to explore, most especially at 6:00 in the morning, when the light is lovely and the basureros are cleaning up after the party animals that will be sleeping for several hours to come.  You will also find, on a Sunday morning, people already in church services, hawkers out with the day’s La Prensa newspaper, and other folks sitting on their stoops, a natural extension of their front rooms.

I’ve been hard at work this past fall to design a new website for my artwork, and I’m pleased to announce it is ready for you to view.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve also created a variety of bodies of new work that haven’t been shown. New work in my Freckles, Cimitiere, and Adolescent Superheroes series are featured, as well as a new set of collodion tintypes. There’s also a set of lovely black and white images from Spain, as well as my other work in photography, encaustics, and printmaking.

Please take some time to browse the new site, located at www.fritzphoto.com/arts.

This month, I’ll have a piece of my artwork in Newspace Center for Photography’s annual juried show, Carnival:

CARNIVAL

February 5th through 28th
Monday-Thursday 10am-8pm
Friday-Sunday 10am-6pm (First Friday’s 6-9pm)

Opening Reception: Friday, February 5th 6-9pm

Newspace Center for Photography is pleased to present our annual themed exhibition. This year’s theme is Carnival. The exhibition brings a diverse array of regional, national, and international photography to Portland and provides exposure for talented emerging and mid-career artists.

From over 300 entries and close to 2,000 individual images, Newspace Executive Director Chris Bennett has selected 45 images for this year’s themed show.

Although I’m out of town traveling in Central America, I hope you’ll stop by and see the show.  There’s some beautiful work in it.

You can also see lots of new work on my new fine art website.