Jordan Bass, This boy who looks like an indolent rapper is actually a service professional, a conscientious worker with an exclusive client, Eduardo Camavinga, young star of Real Madrid and the French national team. She is his personal photographer. She portrays him in the games at the Bernabéu, training at his house, she goes on trips with him and other figures on the team. His maxim is discretion.
I ask him about the time Camavinga and Vinicius went to Marrakech for the weekend. How did you come up with the idea of going there? “It is close to Madrid. It’s sunny”. Speaking about when he accompanied them to Los Angeles, I ask him if these soccer players are very close friends. “They get along great,” he says behind his tinted glasses. I also ask him about the time they went to Rio de Janeiro invited by Vini Jr. What did they see in Rio? “Christ”.
—Did they only see the Christ?
—Yes, we don’t go out much.
Bajo (Toulouse, 27 years old) wears a loose sweatshirt, jeans patchwork and wears very white ones Jordan recently purchased online. Have a drink on a terrace next to the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, sometimes upright in the chair, other times reclining. He is sober, rather sparing, but not impolite, he smiles but does not laugh. He has an Eminem vibe. Even in that reserved view of hip hop glory. He cut his hair a couple of days ago, “style faded”, says, the trendy gradient.
—Did Camavinga’s brother do it to him?
-Always.
Sebastiaõ Camavinga is Camavinga’s older brother. Under him he met him by chance. In the summer of 2020, when Eduardo arrived in Madrid with his family, Sebastiaõ posted some photos of some of his sneakers on Instagram. Jordan wrote to him and recommended a store in Madrid where he had recently worked, during his first moments as an emigrant in the Spanish capital. “I told him they could get him exclusive models.” They made friends. A few months later, Sebastiaõ told him that he was looking for a job as a hairdresser. Jordan helped him achieve it.
The Camavingas are a family of survivors. Expelled by war from their country of origin, the Congo, they arrived at the refugee camp in Angola where Sebastiaõ and Eduardo were born. They emigrated to France, they went through the ordeal of emigrants without resources, poverty, the fight for documents, their house even burned down. That’s where they come from and that’s why Sebastiaõ worked in a hair salon even though his brother had just become a millionaire. She lived with him, but every day she went by bus to do her eight-hour day at a hair salon in the center of Madrid. A year ago he set up his own, where the heads of his brother’s crack cronies pass; and also that of his friend Jordan Bajo, to whom Sebastiaõ returned the detail of finding him a job by proposing to go do a clothing photo shoot for his brother.
“I was in a bar with some friends who had come from France to celebrate my birthday and suddenly I got the message, which is for right now, and I told my friends: ‘Tell me if I’m going to take some photos of him to Camavinga’. And they, ‘well, go’, and I, ‘no, but you’re here to see me’, and they ‘but, bastard, go now, it’s an opportunity!’, and I, ‘okay, I’ll go quickly and I’ll be back’, and I went, I took the photos and I came back with my friends.”
The figure of a footballer’s personal photographer, a generator of visual content, is still unusual. Bajo explains that it is difficult to get a place like this in the world of a soccer star because they are very closed environments. “To enter you have to be a very discreet person. If I were someone who goes around telling everything he does on the networks, I’m sure I couldn’t have been a photographer for any player. Because you are with him in his private life and you should not upload anything. I think my character helps. As a child he was already very discreet. I am sociable, but not with everyone. I like to analyze, look at what is happening around me. They know that I can be trusted,” says Jordan, who worked for Fede Valverde for a few months and has begun to collaborate with Brahim.
—How do you feel about living in a world with so much money?
—I am very clear that it is not my world. I accompany Camavinga and his friends and I live the life they lead, which is a top life, but I always keep in mind that if I am there accompanying them it is because I am doing a job. Believing myself to be the same as them and wanting to elevate my way of living could be very detrimental to me.
With Camavinga, a footballer with style, charisma and intuition for virtual culture, followed on Instagram by 12 million people, Jordan Bajo has received the opportunity of his life after several jobs as a normal, that is, precarious, European boy. and, generally, doomed to years and years of more or less discouraging jobs. In France he earned his money in the post office, in removals, in a supermarket; in Madrid, something better, in a store sneakers. And suddenly, thanks to his tenacious character and a combination of fortune and the nose of a good striker, he entered the universe of a football phenomenon. Far from settling in, he thinks about the future and says that he would like to set up a content creation studio and create a sustainable clothing brand, bringing his training in graphic design (academic) and photography (self-taught) to fashion. “I like crossovers between different types of design. “My inspiration is Virgil Abloh, who was an architect and became a fashion designer.”
Jordan is the son of José Bajo and María Moya, born in the south of France to families from León and Valencia who left Spain in the post-war years. He says that his grandparents never talked to him much about that, but they did talk about Real Madrid. “They were Madrid fans. That is one of my inheritances,” he recalls. He also inherited the work ethic and lively spirit. At the root of his journey, although not immediately, are, after all, the same causes as that of his client Eduardo Camavinga: war and emigration. Therefore, this is a modern story, of young people and sports and fashion and social networks and money, but, deep down, it is also the oldest story in the world: the struggle to prosper.
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