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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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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