The beach is always resetting itself into smooth perfection again.  As a kid, I remember being baffled by whatever magical force did that every time I turned away. And, for a while I made as much mess as I could...moats, shell-studded walls, ring-castles and Sea Oat contraptions...but nothing ever survived the cosmic, flattening reset button of the tide.  I see myself again: sitting cross legged, back to the water, the sun having made my shoulder-skin hot to the touch, sand underneath my fingernails.  Other kids, seagulls, somewhere far off at the edge of my hearing.  And then, there’s water.  My breath taken away.  A sudden lifting, wave, air, and sand churning together so furiously, my lap lost, and then that undercutting as the water rushes back downhill to the sea, where you feel the sand and shell-crush erode out from under you.  The dynamism of that environment is flabbergasting.  And, yet it’s always smoothing-down, leveling-out, and starting-over.

In the photograph of the shells, with the V tracks left by the water, I like thinking about how they stood firmly in the horizontal space of the beach, in their relative position to the dunes, and the residential structures, even the no-wake bouy a hundred yards off shore.  But, they couldn’t hold on to their up and down place.  Anchored in one dimension, another axis changed on them.  There is solidity on barrier islands like Sanibel, but not in the way that you were expecting it.  And, I’m trying to capture that feeling.

Some of the photographs I took this month recorded the scarification imposed on the sand by storm water.  A collision happens when rain is washing towards the sea, while the sea itself is surging onto the land.  It’s hard to tell whether the drain-paths are raised or indented, like when your eye gets lost a bit on a topographical map, and in the middle, away from the edges, you suddenly can’t see what’s supposed to be up or down, mountain or valley.  Or, maybe you can see two worlds at once, two alternative possibilities…the photo negative and the photo positive.  I love the duality of water.  It’s so powerful, yet slips through your fingers; evaporates, freezes, and flows so mutably, while we stay the same; we humans can’t live in it, but we so clearly want to live by it.  Water is a change agent, especially the sea, but also one of our most important symbols of cleansing and purification.  Scarification and regeneration cycle endlessly on the beach.

The Banyan trees of South Florida have exposed roots.  They barely cling to the sand-soil, their somehow too thin leafy tops all out of proportion with the colossal amount of structure necessary to make them stand up. Their circulation is complicated; their multi-trunked bodies like wrought iron sculpture gone hay-wire, or maybe the ruins of so much bent metal, rusting and melting back into itself.  Where do these things even start and stop?  It’s like they don’t trust the whole concept of being trees, keep grabbing hold of anything they can get their hands on, to stay up, to stay grounded.  They remember something; grow with a palpable sense of urgency; seek footholds.

I love the vertical spaces, the postures, emerging and retreating forms, the fusion of root and branch in the Banyans.  They make me think of the anatomical study sheets of the Old Masters, who practiced every conceivable posture of the human body, before painting it.  Sometimes the study is art too.  If there ever was a living sculpture, it’s the Banyan.  When I see their smooth, but frantic, arm structure sprawling across the leaf litter, I can almost see it as time-lapse photography.  A sense of growth-motion is there.  There’s something under the bark, inside the skin.  That’s also true for the mangrove shoots that claim, pull-up by sheer force of will, land from the sea.  They climb themselves on top of the water; just keep growing layer upon layer, as if no one had ever told them that they weren’t on the land, that you can’t walk on water.

I was living in Miami in 1992, when Hurricane Andrew hit, leveling almost everything in its path, including Banyans measuring over a hundred feet in diameter.  They were completely blown over, thrown upside down.  More impressive than the storm’s destruction, however, was that many of these trees were salvaged, regenerated, limb-tangle wombs intact, by simply being propped back up.  Last summer, I spent some time photographing the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer group living on the shores of Lake Eyasi, Tanzania.  They took me to one of their sacred sites, a Baobab tree so ancient, and giant, that it has lifted itself off the ground.  It just keeps reaching for the light.  The thing we would call a tree must start 30 feet off the ground, and what’s down on the earth, with us, is a chamber underneath - cool, eye-blinky dark when you first step-in, so quiet.  For hundreds of years all their babies have been born there.  They remember.

The weather has been crazy in Sanibel this month.  Nature is misbehaving again.  I went out on the beach after a storm, and like the Island’s hardscape, the seascape too had been turned inside out.  There was a box turtle, upside down; crab traps, almost unrecognizable after so much relentless churning, their stone crab prisoners too tired (stoic?) to bother escaping.  Nine-legged sea stars littered the shoreline.  They’re amazing creatures, capable, through regeneration, of surviving the loss of multiple limbs.  They can even regrow a new disc from a single arm, like there’s no distinction between the parts and the whole.  Displaced horse conchs, still tumbling in the surf, tried desperately to evade the wrath of hungry shorebirds.  There were thousands of them on the beach, like something out of Normandy.  “The eyes of the world are upon us.”

My body of work is both an exploration of light and a documentation of tension.  I’ve been going to Sanibel Island since before I was born, and have been photographing it for as long as I can remember.  Sanibel’s real beauty lies in its inextinguishable light – both the literal phenomenon of light’s behavior in the dynamic environment of a barrier island, and its metaphorical opportunities.  I’m interested in the natural tensions of that place, which is ecologically volatile, and lies on an intense boundary of human-nature interaction.  Its unique light is the narrative coherence uniting all these natural tensions and volatilities, and also the metaphorical vehicle for the relationship between me and my mother.  But my images have somehow never caught-up with the naturalistic and emotional potential of that place.  And that’s what I want to do with my project.

I plan to execute this project by shooting on location three times over the course of this quarter with the use of a medium format camera, using black and white film.  My goal for completion of this project is to print ten (size, yet to be determined) images on warm toned, glossy fiber based archival paper.

My family of origin, so to speak, as well as my husband and children, have significantly influenced my work in the past decade.  The family I grew up in was an intensely colorful, albeit quietly yet very obviously flawed, tapestry begun by my Cuban refugee father and runaway Navy brat mother, both of whom were their own keepers of a complicated narrative.  I’m also the younger sister of a severely disabled and disfigured brother, whose scarred face and body have always been his primary narrative.  Through animated story telling, and an amateur interest in photography, my father painstakingly imparted to us the importance of familial documentation, and an archival orientation towards the world.  My mother was keeper of all things beautiful.  Her life, and early death, taught me to see beauty in many contexts, both obvious and unimaginable.  As a child, I sometimes wondered why God gave such a beautiful woman such an ugly baby.  So frightening and confusing was my brother’s appearance, that very early on I trained myself to look beyond it, almost through him, straight to his heart, his truth, his real beauty.  Through my visual arts education, I learned how to create an image that was neither conventionally beautiful, nor political, nor gratuitous, but simply tried to be an honest account of human experience.  When my mother, the center of our universe, died, I felt like all the beauty in my world, and moreover, my ability to see it, had been extinguished.  It took the birth of my first child, Alessandra, five years later, to feel like that gift had returned to me, and since then I have been obsessively photographing my family and Sanibel.

I’m also strongly influenced by the work of Clyde Butcher, Chris Rainier, and Sebastiao Salgado, for both their artistic brilliance and their ability to use photography as a social tool.  All three photographers imbue their work with a spiritualism that is inextricably linked to the natural environment, and their genius (to me) lies in using that naturalism to tell a deep, multi-dimensional human story.

My work aspires to convey the connectedness that we all share, with each other and with our natural environment.  One of my favorite photos is of my brother, David, taken by a Miami Herald staff photographer.  In it, my brother’s face appears in the hands of the surgeon who, for sixteen years, meticulously tried to reconstruct his face.  Even at the age of twelve, its narrative simplicity really resonated with me.  My brother’s horrifically scarred face became a thing of beauty in the hands of its master craftsman.  In this single image, the photographer was able to convey the emotional connectedness between doctor and patient, as well as subject and audience…his camera became an instrument of the heart, connecting all of us.

Sanibel has always been a family place for me, and my work there is based on a profoundly personal dialogue between my mother and me.  Its physical geography, the aspect of its humidity-hazed light, and its place as a flashpoint of human-nature contact make it the right narrative substrate for my work.

PHOT 709, Post #1

Most recently, I've been working on two different portfolios: documenting endangered cultures, primarily in Namibia and Tanzania and shooting Sanibel Island's landscape.  All of my Africa work is shot, in color, digitally; whereas, Sanibel is in black and white, film.  For the purposes of PHOT 709, I'd like to continue with the latter...

Sanibel Island is a family place for me; it’s where my mother took us when I was a child, and where I take my own children as an adult.  Since my mother’s death, the light on Sanibel has taken on a spiritual dimension to me.  She suffered from bi-polarity, and could at times be unpredictably terrifying, and then, almost in the same moment, emit the most brilliant warmth and light.  The island’s thunderstorms are like that, black and pelting, then blinding light a moment later.  My mom’s spirit envelops and permeates Sanibel … like an impossibly thin layer of water, ebbing and flowing around a moon jelly; like the glimmering sunlight on the retreating tidal flow, the water segmented like plates on a sea turtle’s shell; like the voluminous cloudscape that surrounds the island every afternoon, metaphor for making something out of nothing; like the divinely placed shadow amongst a flock of gulls; like the beautifully isolated mangrove, so resolved and determined to remain rooted in her oyster bed; and like the weather worn trees of Cayo Costa.  They have another life, those old trees.  Their curvaceous womb-wood makes windows and composition, becomes sculptural.  But mostly she’s the light and water, those reagents of reflection.  Sanibel allows my mom and me the sacred space to continue to be in dialogue with one another, and for those conversations to manifest themselves through the images I capture.