 Pepper Negron
Brings Darkness to Light
By Robert Waddell, June 18, 2009
It’s a sad gothic tale: a man falls in love with a woman. The relationship runs its course and the woman and man break up. The man is left with wounded feelings and the woman eventually marries someone else, adding more hurt and misery to his life. Then, the woman is murdered by her husband. And the man is left bereft, full of remorse.
However, this isn’t fiction. This really happened to composer, photographer, poet and film maker Pepper Negron.
Instead of wallowing in self-pity after his former lover’s death, Negron would take his emotions and pour them into his various artistic endeavors. The beautiful actresses and models he photographs are made more attractive with a mysterious forbidding quality.
“I wrote this poem called “By Your Grave” about loosing someone you love,” Negron said. “…I really loved her, years passed….There’s always this dark element but even though its dark there’s a sense of beauty behind it….Even with the images, I recently shot a girl with keyboards in her hands all full of blood.”
Born in Puerto Rico, as a baby, Negron was sent to the Bronx to live with his grandmother. As a child, Negron was enthralled with “The Twilight Zone,” Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. In junior high school, an art teacher recognized Negron’s talents and recommended him to the High School of Art and Design where he was accepted but expelled for fighting. He was expelled from 4 different high schools, he said.
In the late 1970s, after dropping out of high school and working odd jobs, Negron saved enough money to travel to Europe, view art and meet new people. On his return, Negron would become a personal manger in the music industry. Always interested in photography, he said that because of his artistic temperament he has never been able to hold down a nine-to-five job, and for him this was an easy transition into filmmaking.
 In the last couple of years Negron has made horror films with titles like “Blood Drips,” and “In Stillness I Lie,” which one reviewer called “…a world where loneliness holds you hostage and you can find no reason to continue without the love you once held so close.” And his poem about the woman Negron loved won him an Editor’s Choice Award by the International Library of Poetry and Poetry.com in 2007.
“He is a unique and creative individual that is way ahead of his time,” said poet and fellow photographer Mia Roman Hernandez who included Negron in the photo exhibit “Visions of Puerto Rican Pride” at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center. “He thinks outside of the box, is never afraid to experiment with the new and different and is always happy to hear the ideas of others. His work is very unique, dimensional and thought provoking.”
As a photographer, Negron creates dark images of women with runny make-up or soaked in blood and in the process he captures the hidden depths of his actresses and models.
“Pepper takes some of my favorite pictures of myself,” said actress and model Teresa Reynolds who was in the play “Platanos and Collard Greens.” “This guy comes up with the craziest stuff. During the shoot he shows me what he’s done. He’s good with positive re-enforcement.”
Today, Negron is completing his 7 short horror film collection. Two of the movies have already been completed and the others are in pre- and post-production. He has already written two feature length films that are being shopped around, he said.
Before embarking on his filmmaking career, Negron read many scripts to learn the format of this type of writing. He saw how other film makers made movies and sent his work to film festivals.
Negron’s idea was to create 7 short films and sell them as a collection called “Dark Tales of Tortured Souls.” He has also composed the music for his films.
“They’re not really horror films,” Negron said, “they’re dark, psychological, like a person going through pain, mentally. I love ghost stories. The next one I’m going to shoot is called ‘Buried Dreams’ about 4 little girls who are playing with an Ouija board.”
In Negron’s film “Blood Drips,” techno organ music plays as a woman lies in a bathtub. Talking over images of suicide, a viewer hears, “Frightened, I’m comforted by my razor blade and the thread marks that leaves my arm distorted.”
 A beautiful woman writhes in pain in bloody bath water. With a rap and music video sensibility, Negron fills the screen with ominous psychological mystery.
In “In Stillness I Lie,” character Tatiana hugs herself through a straight jacket in a totally white room. Madness, pain, isolation and lovelessness grip and envelope the character’s obsessive insanity.
An apt description of Pepper’s creative work comes not from fans, friends or colleagues but from Jose Luis Borges, who wrote, “A writer -- and, I believe, generally all persons -- must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
Negron finds inspiration for films and his photography from the oddest of places. Finding a discarded keyboard, he got the idea for the blood dripping photo. Recently, he was transfixed by the image of a dead pigeon on the side walk. A self-described Wiccan, Negron is up beat for someone with such a dark artistic outlook. Even his production company is called Pagan Films. For him, Negron said, that his idea of beautiful deviates from society’s norm, just as his idea of success deviates from the norm.
“People have always told me to ‘wait for the right time’ but the right time is right now,” Negron said, “…You could wait forever for the right time so you have to go out there and create your own work and make things happen.”
This story was developed through the Education Beat Writing Fellowship at the New York Community Alliance. |
