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Maddie

Maddie

The clue that my mysterious employers gave me about my new subject was: “Moonlighting”. And for a moment I thought that I had to travel -again- through time and space to find myself in LA during the shooting of one of my most beloved tv shows of the 80’s… Could my subject be David Addison, Miss Dipesto, or even Maddie Hayes? Well, my subject’s name was Maddie, she was just as beautiful as Maddie Hayes and I did not had to travel through time to photographically investigate her. Just like Maddie Hayes was reluctant to start the Blue Moon Detective Agency with David Addison, my Maddie was reluctant to use her popular name, given that her christian name was Adamandia, which means diamond like. I could sympathise and even agree with her, but my love for Moonlighting prevailed.

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Jasmine

Jasmine

My new subject was a fire-fighter’s daughter that could make herself invisible by touching a Chinese dragon pendant of mysterious origin, gifted to her by her mother. Her mother was a beautiful inter-dimensional model and the pendant’s power was coming from her. Needless to say that while recuperating from some inter-dimensional displacement (which I have explained in previous blogs that is energy consuming) the dragon’s power weakened. And it’s exactly in such an occasion that my window of opportunity opened. A photographic investigator knows there is no luck, but that don’t prevent her from taking advantage of it!

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Margarita

Margarita

As you know, a photographic investigator’s special power is the one that permits her to travel through time and dimensions. And although this gives her a great advantage and helps her accomplish her assignments more effectively, sometimes there are complications. One of them is that repeated time or dimension displacements deplete her energy. Another one is that the use of spirits usually messes up with her destination, resulting in her finding herself in a place, time or dimension different than the one planned. It all started with the usual cryptic message from my mysterious employers: This time it was “Margarita”. At the time, I was in an art exhibition in Cuba, having a tequila shot, a spirit that I hate. And with good reason. My assignment was urgent and so I did not hesitate to depart immediately to the given coordinates. Unfortunately, I found myself in Mexico 20 years before the intended timeline and in a dimension where a margarita was a kind of cold coffee, the favourite drink of my new subject. Her name was also Margarita and she was waiting for me out of time, out of dimension and space. Of course, as always, it was all planned to the minutest detail by my mysterious and powerful employers…

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A forgotten backstage in Giudecca

A forgotten backstage in Giudecca

A photographic investigator never discards anything… Not old cameras, old cars, old furniture nor old SD cards. Because she knows that at a certain moment a hidden treasure will be revealed in or through them. That’s exactly what happened. Hidden in a SD card were photos -mostly backstage- of an amazing photo shooting of Nicoletta Lucerna’s famous corsets in Giudecca, with my favourite model, the beautiful Luana Ghezzo. It was the May of 2018 - and it seems like yesterday to me. I guess a photographic investigator always misses Venice.

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Seven

Seven

Seven was my new subject. How did I know? The same way I always do… As you probably know by now, my mysterious employers dedicate their lives in finding imaginative and creative ways for sending me clues about my next assignment. This time it was a telepathically transmitted message in the brain of one of my faithful cat-helpers, Juanita. She knocked seven times with her paw on the head of my other faithful helper, Lupe, during a friendly round of greek-roman wrestling. So I knew that the famous Seven -a mysterious name equally enigmatic as her presence- was my new subject. Because a photographic investigator always uses her intuitive leads. Seven was a poet of Japanese, noble descend, who was brought up by Austrian shepherds in the Alps for her own protection from her parents -poets of the imperial court- enemies. And although she was trained as a cook, her inherited talent in poetry was revealed by her compulsive poetry writing. Her poems were published, shared, read and cherished among fellow poets and writers of noble descend who were living an incognito existence. And by watchers and investigators like me. I will not reveal what secret powers I had to use to be able to penetrate their circle - but I can assure you that I used them wisely. My assignment had to be completed by the summer solstice and the Fates were good to me. I attended a noble poetry reading the night before. I knew though that this assignment would not be the only one concerning Seven.

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Escravo da alegria

Escravo da alegria

As I was browsing through old carnival photos with people that are no longer in my life and in places that no longer exist, this amazing song by Toquinho was playing in my internal sound system… Escravo da alegria - slave to joy. And as I went to you tube to listen to it externaly as well, in one of the comments I read how Toquinho composed this song: He saw a phrase on a truck bumper that caught his attention and served as inspiration for this great hit. The message said: “If love is fantasy, I find myself lately in the middle of carnival”. The same way that my photographic investigations resolve themselves.

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Samsara

Samsara

Samsara is wisdom unrecognised, said Vajrasattva. In the heart of enlightenment, samsara and sorrow are merely the play of the All Good. And the five poisons of lust, aversion, dulness, arrogance and jealousy reveal themselves as five wisdoms. Wisdom is all pervading like the light of the sun. It is an all-healing flow of compassion than washes away our five negative predispositions. This photographic investigation brought the above truths to mind…

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Eternal Newness

Eternal Newness

This photographic investigation took place in silence while listening to excerpts from a Ilie Cioara’s book - and affirmed itself through itself as power and beauty. He also wrote: “Life is perpetual freshness, in permanent movement,
As such, we need to be the same way;
A childlike innocence is requested by Existence,
Every time, in every circumstance – a priceless purity.”

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Caritas abundant in Omnia

Caritas abundant in Omnia

My new subject, Tatiana, was working in Sorrento and I was there for it’s healing waters, as I have mentioned in a previous blog post (“The healing waters of Sorrento”). As usual, I had no idea about this new assignment, neither did I know that the woman who served me my sour cherry drink every day, was the one I had to photographically investigate. My clue came one night through intuition and via a dj who was strategically placed in the right time at the right bar by my mysterious employers. Intuition made me send a waiter to ask the name of a song I liked and the clue came in a piece of paper. The dj wrote: “Caritas abundant in Omnia” (“Love Aboundeth in All Things”). It was certainly not the song I’ve heard, but the name of a hymn written by Hildegard of Bingen -a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages. I knew right away that I had to look around me for an angelic creature. This is the first part of this photographic investigation…

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Neither artifice nor evasion

Neither artifice nor evasion

The clue about my new subject came with the wind. It was expected through the mail, but after an unprecedented explosion in the post office -a product of overwhelming anticipation for the upcoming Chinese New Year, the year of the Dragon- the wind took over the deliveries that the fire failed to eliminate. Only a small piece of half burned paper had survived, with the words: “Eyes with neither artifice nor evasion”. It was one of the more clear clues that I had received for a long time. I knew exactly where to find this amazing subject. The Year of the Dragon was approaching promising not to disappoint…

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Suddenly this fall...

Suddenly this fall...

Suddenly this fall everything was changing. A photographic investigator can -under extreme circumstances- manipulate planetary and galactic movements to maintain a situation that requires further investigating. And that was exactly what I was attempting this fall. Seven planets became retrograde in order to stop my subjects from moving into different realities. With no success so far. But a photographic investigator also can recognise when a full circle is complete and she surrenders her wants and needs to the wisdom of the universe.

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Call off the search

Call off the search

When a photographic investigator who discovers her subjects following clues that arrive at her doorstep by mysterious ways receives a note that says “Call off the search”, what is she supposed to do? Maybe stop looking and realise that her subject is closer to her than she could have ever imagined.

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Take the L train

Take the L train

My new assignment arrived while Dave Brubeck was playing “Take the A train”. My faithful companion brought me a piece of paper that said: “Initial”. In the life of a photographic investigator everything is interconnected and the course of the investigation -as well as it’s subject- are revealed by themselves without the necessity of thinking or wondering. The reason behind it always remains unsaid, though. But I am OK with it. Anyway, I knew that I had to replace the “A” with another letter and that that letter would be the initial of my subject’s first name. My intuition told me that was an

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The Jamaica Inn

The Jamaica Inn

My new assignment had to do with hair. My new subject’s hair, not hair in general. The Jamaica Inn was a hair salon and at the same time it was my only clue about her and where to find her. As any good photographic investigator I pretended to be a customer with a particularly bad hair week and got to work while a very handsome hair stylist was contemplating what to do with my hair. A photographic investigator is used to make sacrifices.

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Woman on the run

Woman on the run

My subject was witness to a miraculous manifestation. And although the words “manifestation” and “law of attraction” are very widely used and invoked today, very few people actually believe that they work -this is probably why they prefer giving endless lectures about it. But some people can do it, and those people prefer keeping it a secret. So when I was hired to investigate an actual witness to a magical appearance of a mansion -the way Aladin’s lantern would do it- I knew that my subject was on the run and that the time I had was limited…

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Sitting here in limbo...

Sitting here in limbo...

“Sitting here in limbo, but I know it won’t be long”, sung Jimmy Cliff and that phrase was the clue for my next photographic investigation. My subject was Zenobia, the daughter of a wealthy family from Chicago who was taking a vacation on a tropical island of the Pacific with a suitcase full of golden coins for her expenses. It was a tradition in her family to pay only with gold, but in this island the authorities in the airport had never encountered a similar case -most of them had never seen golden coins before- so they confiscated her gold until a higher authority decided it was OK to give it back. Until then, Zenobia was living in limbo, spending her days in a coffee shop near the airport, waiting for a new development. I know that my powerful, mysterious employers had the power to arrange for her to have her gold back, but they wanted me to photographically investigate her. So I did it fast, because I don’t like for my subjects to be miserable…

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