WS studioarts: a gathering of my husband's art

Ceramics. Photography. Graphic Arts.

This is the work my husband does.

This summer, Bill has brought all of that together in a single web site, which I have the privilege of launching here.

Some of our clients will recognize some of the images. Our pottery friends will recognize the pots. Our dancing friends will find themselves inside Bill's magical 3-D imagery. My niece will find herself in the image above, reading a book that is called Small Damages.

The site is like a gathering. I hope you'll take some time to explore it.

The link, again, is this.

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My new screensaver

and my thanks to those of you who have so kindly commented on the photographs these past few days. I am a peaceful person, when I have a camera in hand, when my only responsibility is to see. To wait for the horse to find me, to wait for the child to laugh, to wait for the sun to fall to just the right place. Photography slows me down. It forces patience. And I love having an outlet for it here, on the blog.

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Zebra in the Garden

Working with a macro lens is like looking at life through a microscope—seeing what you would not see were you just passing through. So that yesterday, between rain bursts, I could be found crouching in my garden or braced above a vase of flowers, dialing in and out of temporal focus. I was catching the reflected crossbars on a puddled stamen and discovering the zebra stripes of iris. I was thinking how razor edged the lily is, how much like a skirt a blur of hydrangea seems, as photographed from above.

I brace myself for the macro lens. I balance against a wall, try not to breathe, snap. It's rare when a photograph works just right. No matter what gets MemorySticked in the end, I've had the privilege of seeing.

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Behind the Camera's Tunneling Distance

Once on an overnight train from Barcelona to Venice, this boy became my friend. Outside my compartment he sat, cat like, waiting for me to compliment him on the fearless red of his shoes. He liked to stand at the windows, looking out. I liked that, too. He performed acrobatics on the old blue rug. I was his audience.

He wanted his portrait taken. I took several.

I escape mirrors, as you know. I refute photographs of myself (just ask Tirsa). I am out with my camera, most every day, tunneling a distance. I wonder now, looking back on this boy, how it might feel to look a camera in the eye and to say, undaunted, See me.

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Boy in Yellow Shirt, in Tree

Though there was a war on and I'd been cautioned, I was often alone in El Salvador. I never believe, as much as I should, in danger. On this day we'd left in a mad hurry from the white house in Santa Tecla and driven a highly militarized road (guns everywhere, soldiers at attention) to the raw edge of a cattle-and-pigs somewhere, where we loaded our hastily assembled things into a pontoon of sorts and floated to an estuary. No one told me, until much later, that we were escaping the threat of bombs, a report that the American Embassy had been targeted.

The others unpacked and spoke in their Spanish. I was confused and wandered away. Down a dirt road where women balanced jugs of water on their heads and the houses were brilliantly thatched.

Finally I stopped and waited for this boy to look up and see me. Beyond the thin barbed wire, he would not. I wonder to this day what he was thinking.

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Haloed

I'd come through the coffee jungle. I stood at their door, and one turned, and though I was intruding and do not mean, when I take my camera out, to steal the private (only to spare the moment from the regret of time), I could not move—for their beauty, for the light that haloed their hair. As if they were angels settled into a one-room cinderblock shack.

Does the one write at her desk?

Does she mean to?

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Raw, Guileless

Although I've had an obsession with photography since I built my first pinhole camera back in elementary school, it wasn't until I married a Salvadoran and began to travel to his country that portrait photography became my great passion—photographs of people living their real lives, children, in particular. In El Salvador, then in southern Spain, then in Juarez, San Miguel de Allende, and West and North Philadelphia, I have been confronted, again and again, with the raw, guileless beauty I ache to carry home.

The camera frees me from the need for conversation. It demands of me an observer's stance. It requires no vocabulary—not, at least, right then, when the child stands before me, in her bird-colored dress.

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Writing my Life: Excerpted from Talk

I take my camera most everywhere; it is my habit. I take it because the weight of it around my neck reminds me to see—to decide against deciding that my world is overly familiar, already known. I look for cracks and fissures, for the new or the newly announced. I look for the water to run a different color in the stream, or for the sun to strike the pond at winter with deafening, delirious force. If I can’t see, then I don’t know, and if I don’t know, I’m not writing, and while some may question the value of the written word, I shall make this claim for stories: They spook and spur us. They recall for us. They suggest the tremble of the whole so that we may believe in the lives we’re living.

Live your life, some say. Don’t write it. But I don’t know how to do one without the other. I don’t know how to feel alive unless I’m writing.

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The Day with Me

Why do we take photographs? Why do I? Because it takes me outside, into the weather. Because it forces me to see. Because afterward it is what I have of that day—snatched, held, lit, shaken, stirred. I was there, a photograph says. And the day was there with me.

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