Esteros del Iberá/Anticipation

I'd like to avoid an ending to this travel photo-story by coming back to where I begun with a personal note on anticipation.

Here in this picture I decided to photograph the house of a man who I saw day after day seating outside his house, Mate on hand, listening to the radio and looking at the "road" in front of him, waiting for something, waiting for someone to walk by, some car to drive pass, something to happen.

Esteros del Iberá, Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, is possibly the quietest town I have ever been to. Only reachable through hours of dirt track and only when it doesn't rain, it is the home of 300 bird species and the one and only bar. There I found a feeling of unprecedented freedom as I walked around town. Suffice to say that not many cars did actually go by this house at all.

To anticipate seems necessary to plan ahead, to protect oneself from future danger, or to positively think of the future. However I feel sometimes we live in anticipation, dedicating most of our days to predict what will happen next, worrying about our future, or purely dreaming and fantasizing about it, so by the time the car does go by we are not ready to enjoy the view, to talk to the driver, or to simply be able to say "I saw it pass".

Anticipation seems somehow to be opposed to surprise and as such I do try to resist its temptations. I have always been concerned with the way we seem to be always waiting for definite things to happen, as if we were slaves to preconceptions and easy judgments. As a documentary cinematographer I am used to wait for those "decisive" moments to happen. You visit a place, you meet its people, you visit and revisit and you wait and wait because you know where and when to wait for things to happen. I sometimes will spend long hours purely observing what's around me, seeing it change, seeing "change", looking for the unknown, with utmost belief in reality's ability to surprise me.

So, when I look back at this picture, at times I think of the man behind the curtain as someone less dependant on a definite future, someone who is purely freer to sit back and watch the world go by. Someone who's main anticipation is his faith that something, not a car, not the usual face but something new, perhaps just a small detail but nevertheless new, is out there, right in front of us. Someone whose life is not about waiting or worrying about things that are just about to begin. Someone who rather spends his life vibrantly enjoying his pursue of the unknown.