Paco Grande: Roaming Photographer with Cane Josué Ramírez
At fifty-five, Paco Grande sees himself as a nomadic photographer. It's genetic. His childhood, marked by exile, influenced his relationship with images as sensitive expressions of the world. The medical term for his form of blindness is pigmentary retinitis. As the retina's layers progressively die off and stop refracting light, one's field of vision eventually narrows, as if looking one were looking through a viewfinder. According to Paco Grande, "It's like having a disconnected television monitor in your eye." He feels that blindness is a stigmatized condition and that blind people should be considered as having "extravision" as their perception of the world becomes a paradox. Grande was born in Madrid in 1948. His father, Francisco Grande Covial, was an eminent physiologist who went into exile during the Franco regime. Grande then worked in Copenhagen with Nobel Prize winner Emil Krogh, one of the doctors who discovered B-complex vitamins. Grande first became interested in photography when he moved to the United States. He was only twelve when he saw The Family of Man and was impressed by pictures of Mexico and Peru that formed part of the exhibition. A few weeks later, his aunt-a nun who would live to be 102 years-old- gave him a camera as a presentoAfter that, he started taking photographs which were subsequently published in his school's newspaper. At that time, Paco Grande also had an 200
interest in sports-he played all kinds of ball games and took up wrestling . In fact, it was while playing ball games that he first noticed he had eye problems-even though he had good reflexes, he couldn't see the ball coming at him . Currently, Paco Grande and Jessica Lange are working on a memoir of their life together. During the 1960s in the United States, the draft turned young people into anonymous soldiers. Some protested but others, like Paco Grande, had no choice but to join the service. Regarding this situation, he sta tes: Going to Vietnam must have been such an experience! Such a shock. Luckily I was sent to Germany. Anyway, it was while I was in the army that my illness was finally diagnosed correctly. I was a soldier for two years. What did you do after the service? I returned to New York where I met Danny Seymour and we started a film company. The first movie we made was a short about rural life in Spain-it focused on the life of the Gypsies in Andalusia. We called it Flamencología (Flamencology). I started traveling with my friend and business partner, and the first place we went to was Morocco. By that time Jessica [Lange]-whom I'd met in 1968-and I were already together, and we traveled all over North America (including Mexico) and Europe. In Amsterdam, Danny and I filmed a street peddler. The film showed how people like him were social outcasts.