I shared these feelings with a girlfriend I had during those days: we both fought the idea that we had to repress those feelings because of the apparently more important tasks I mentioned before. One day we found a poem by the German author Bertold Brecht which expressed in beautiful words what we felt. In a loose translation - this is from German to Spanish to English - Brecht more or less said: " Such terrible times these, that even to talk about trees seems a crime for fear of silencing so much iniquity ". Brecht wrote this in the 30's, during the rise of Nazism. Thirty years later we felt represented in those lines: times continued to be terrible. And we could of course apply them today: what with Chechnya and Bosnia and Rwanda, etc., etc., etc.

Yes, these are terrible times. But, are they worse than during Vietnam, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the trenches of Verdun, Colonialism, the Spanish Conquest, the Inquisition, the Black Plague, the Crusades and on and on, as we go back in time? Even in terrible times flowers still bloom every spring, children wake up at night, someone sings, they are out of work, she loves him, a dog barks, he is on drugs, man flies in space, and yes, people somewhere are dying because there's nothing left to eat.

Life is more complicated than a few wars and I sincerely believe that many of us have forgotten to talk about the trees. I find the self appointed role of redeemers that some photographers have taken upon themselves quite strange. They seem to be saying " How dare you not to care about this or that subject ". Well, people do care about many things that touch their lives. But it is in human nature to have a set of priorities. We all feel that, it is written in our genes. Everyone worries more for his sick child than what might be happening in Bosnia at the same time. And it's OK. And we shouldn't be ashamed, because the mother in Rwanda cries for her dead husband and not for the junkie in the Bronx.

And the same thing happens in the tribe. The tribe wants to know first about their neighbors, the ones they might cross in the jungle paths. They want to know what happened with the son that left and married a girl from another family. They need information about new hunting sites that others near them might have found, of a new cure for a snake bite, what last month's lunar eclipse might mean, who replaced the shaman that died.

Amazingly enough, photojournalists appear to have different priorities. They descend on foreign conflicts like anthropologists on Mars, practicing a kind of photographic colonialism. They gather shocking images here and there and then they complain because nobody seems to care. I want to be perfectly clear: I admire some of that work, I think it needs to be done because the stories are relevant, the tribe needs to know about them too. But I will not jump to the conclusion that photojournalism is dying because there's not enough space to publish those pictures.

Young and no so young photographers everywhere choose recurrent themes: children in the streets, insane asylums, prostitution, prisons. Does this reflect a sincere social commitment? I honestly believe it does not, even if they believe it is. What I do think is that it is much more difficult to shoot well people in love, a close up of a personality, the pulse of suburbia, the rise of bureaucracy, the new codes of the young or any other story that reflects the theater of life. Some seem to be saying "give me a bag lady and I'll give you a picture anytime". It's pure manipulation of defenseless subjects. It reflects a lack of imagination, a choice for the easiest way to shock the viewer.