The 73^rd ARTCaffè hosted the artist Jaime Permuth in person in Seoul. People connected also online from the US, China, Thailand, and Australia.

Jaime focused his talk on three projects: "Yonkeros", "The Street Becomes", and "Olmedini El Mago". He shared the inspirations that brought him to the projects; how they developed and evolved through time; the challenges to overcome, and the intuitions to follow.

An enchanting journey along touching pictures enriched by his deep sensibility, by his sensitive and thoughtful way to approach each single story.

What follows is a summary of his speech, together with some of the pictures he shared during the event.

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Jaime Permuth: I was born in Guatemala. I spent some years in Israel as well, where I studied psychology and literature, and then I made my way to New York, where I lived the greater part of my life as an adult, working in photography.

No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky. I came to New York with great faith and a sense of adventure. And it didn't disappoint. New York City will meet you wherever you want the city to meet you. No dream is too big for New York City. That's part of the reason why I wanted to be there.

Today, I will share three projects with you. This kind of work takes a year or two, or sometimes longer per project, so it is very ambitious to try to talk about them in just half an hour. But I will, showing a small selection of images from each project to give you a sense of what they are about.

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The first project I'm going to share with you is “Yonkeros”. The book was published in 2013 by La Fabrica in Madrid, and has a beautiful essay by Francisco Wollman.

Yonkeros refers to people who work with junk and scrap metal. It's derivated from the English junk, but sounded to a Latin American ear as yonk: yonke is the person who works with junk. The scrap metal businesses in New York City used to be in a place called Willets Point, Queens. That's where I'm taking you. Willets Point is no longer a home to scrap metal businesses, because New York City decided to redevelop the land. In the area, there is a stadium, that was renovated at a cost of almost a billion dollars to become City Field. The city did not want junk on the other side of that stadium, and that's the reason Willets Point had to go.

The story of Willets Point is told in a year. I wanted to be there for every season, and to see not only the way the landscape changed, but how the working conditions changed as well.

I shot 15,000 photographs over one year. The book has a little bit over 100. So, I could keep you here all day, telling you stories about how I got there, what my impressions were, how the mechanics always wanted to get me drunk. On and on. But I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to get you through some images.

Willis Point is located across the East River from La Guardia Airport. You have airplanes coming down every few minutes, and there's something about the airplanes that really pulls at the heartstrings of the mechanics, who are mostly from Mexico and Ecuador. I have many pictures with airplanes in them. Once, I waited for the airplane to be in the frame. We know that airplanes don't come down on the wire from the sky to La Guardia, but the effect I got in my picture was kind of real. This is the kind of picture I selected for the book.

I kept on going back to Willis Point pretty often, for about a year. Families and cars are an important part of this story as well. Willis Point used to be for the working class, and you could tell a lot about each family and the kind of car that they drove and what they said about their prospects.

There is a portrait that I love because I photographed the guy three different times until I was able to get the right image. For those of you who are interested in photography, sometimes a good portrait hides a better portrait, but you have to keep opening doors to get there. I photographed this man and I thought he was very charismatic. I liked the first portrait, then the second portrait better, but only after about six months, I was able to do the right one.

There's a whole story written in ink on his back. Some of the older tattoos are fading. Some of the tattoos are fresher, and you can see a progression on his back. One says “Perdon Madre Mia”: he’s asking for forgiveness for something that is about to happen. He told me that when he got it, he was afraid that maybe he would have never been able to apologize in person to his mother. You can reconstruct a timeline of his life that way.

This was an important book for me to publish, it opened many doors. One of the things that made me really proud about the book is the title of the essay. Whenever I hire a commission, I wouldn’t hire a critic, but rather a poet or a novelist. Their words might not reflect on my photographs necessarily, but they build on a same line of inquiry.

“The street becomes” is the next project that I want to share with you. The book was published in 2022 by Meteoro Editions in Amsterdam. This project is a result of a fellowship that I got at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, which made it possible for me to spend two months working with the Smithsonian collection.

Every city in the United States has a kind of different Latin population. For example, New York is very Puerto Rican, very Dominican; Chicago is very Mexican; Washington, DC is very Central American. For me, the opportunity to go to Washington DC was a way to investigate some of my own past. Their archives are a way to travel in time .

The project is interested in the changing nature of the urban street during times of war and times of peace. What is war and what is peace? That was very arbitrary. I decided that war would be represented by images from the US Marine Corps of the occupation of Central America and the Caribbean in the early 20th century. And that peace would be represented by the Latino festivals. I was fascinated by both bodies of work and I decided to build a project based on them. War is always in slightly warm tone, and peace is always a cooler gray. The work is actually perfect for a double pages book. An image like this is followed by an image like that, and I wanted the readers to build in their ownheads the relationship between them.

The images from the Dominican Republic are often more recent because the US occupied the Dominican Republic twice, again in the 60s. The Latino festival images were made by people who lived in those neighborhoods or were sometimes amateur photographers, and they were not very well known, but they happened to be there and document. I had to go knocking on people's doors, call people up, explain my project, and then ask for permission to look through their archives, and digitize them. I needed to get their blessing to use the images and to transform them for my own purposes, to then be able to show them in galleries and museums, to sell them, to publish them in a book.

The images from the US Marine Corps were shot with large format cameras, 8x10 or4x5. That means the negatives are sometimes pretty big. The images from the Latino festival in Washington D.C. were mostly 35 millimeter, and the 35-millimeter negatives are very tiny. I had to transformed to make them work together. The first thing I did was to turn everything black and white, and then I started going back and forth until I lost some of the midtone information. Because I was more interested in the gestural elements, I wanted the pictures to feel a little bit more like charcoal drawings than photographs.

‍This project was ready to be published and I was going to go with Smithsonian press, which I thought would be fitting, but we had a disagreement because they wanted a more academic book. For me, this was never an academic book. There is no academic reason to combine the Latino festival and the US Marine Corps occupation. There's a poetic, personal reason for that.

The book actually took seven years to publish. I'm so happy with the way it came out. The essay for the book is a conversation between myself and Olivia Cadaval, who is the director of the Folk art museum at the Smithsonian.

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The next project is not a book yet, but I hope it will soon be. I'm best known for long-term documentary projects in the lives of communities, and this is a very different kind of project for me.

Olmedini is an 82-year-old blind magician who works the subways in New York for a living. He comes from Ecuador, where he was already a magician before moving to New York. One of Ecuador's greatest magicians. He had a TV show, and he was doing all kinds of glamorous things. He would go to New York every so often, just to get a taste of the New York scene. He liked to go to Broadway, take beautiful women dancing, and shop for fancy suits. Then he would go back to Ecuador.

But on one of those trips, one day, he decided to stay. He didn't speak English. He didn't have—well, you can never have enough money to live in New York. So, even if you have a car and a nice house in Ecuador, you'd be surprised how quickly you run out of money. He did, and he went underground in the subway.

I met him 20 years earlier, like thousands of other New Yorkers who take the subway. I spent so many hours underground, and on one of those trips, I saw this magician walk in. He was dressed in a tuxedo with a red cotton shirt, he was wearing a top hat and pushing a little cart. He stopped in the middle of the train and whistled because he didn't speak English. Then, he started his show. I was so overwhelmed. To me, he was like the kind of magician I grewup with in Guatemala. I came to Olmedini, said hello, and gave him a bill. He gave me a card, which I kept for 20 years. And I don't keep many things for 20 years.

One summer, I woke up thinking about Olmedini. I looked for the card, found it, and called the number. Of course, that didn't work. But I started looking for him. It took me about a week to trace him back. We talked, and he explained to me that he had lost his sight due to a stroke. But he was still working. I met him, and that was the first day we shot together. We didn't have a lot of time to talk. I just got on the train with him and started shooting, and I would continue shooting for almost three years after that.

He lives alone. If you can imagine working in the New York City subway when you're blind, and you're 80, the subway is neither an easy nor a safe place. And then coming back home at the end of the day after you worked for eight or nine hours in the moving trains. Come back to an empty house.

About three months into the project, I contacted the New York Times, and sent them one photograph with a short description, and a portfolio. They loved the story, they published it, and that changed everything. Then, from France, Russia, Spain, Los Angeles, Miami, etc., all of a sudden, when he had already thought that maybe that would have never happened for him in New York, everybody started knocking on Olmedini’s door.

Actually, nobody could find Olmedini, but everybody could find me. I became the agent of a blind magician. I never took a penny, but everybody called me. One day, I got a call from a woman who said, 'This is the New York Yankees.' They had seen my work in the New York Times. Every year, they would honor three New Yorkers during Hope Week. And they wanted me to help them get Olmedini involved because they wanted to honor him.

I couldn’t tell him too much. So, I just told him to be ready on a certain date, early in the morning. I suggested he get a really nice haircut and have his best suit pressed. I added, ‘I can't tell you much more than that, but it's going to be one of the best days of your life.’

On that day, everybody was there, camped out outside Olmedini’s home, which is a building for welfare recipients, the poorest of the poor. I can't even describe what it felt like to him. They escorted him to the subway, and then he performed all the way up to Yankees Stadium. They asked him to throw the ceremonial first pitch, which is usually an honor reserved for ambassadors or heads of state. But how does a blind man throw the ceremonial first pitch at Yankees Stadium in front of 40,000 people? We discussed it a few minutes before he went up. I said to him to just throw it like a softball. But he said that was not how they did it in the big leagues. So, he did it the right way.

The NewYork Times opened a lot of doors for Olmedini. There's a magazine, called G9, that exclusively publishes magic. I never heard of it, but it's the Bible of the Magic World, and his entire life, Olmedini’s dream was that they would just mention him. Well, they gave him the cover and 16 pages inside, with my photographs. It is a really nice interview, and this is how you build a legacy. Also, he was invited to an important magic festival in Ohio. That was a big stage as well, and he killed it there. I chose Olmedini because, in my heart, I believedhe was a world-class magician, and I trusted how much it moved me to see him perform. The one in Ohio was another moment of truth. And he really proved himself.