Issue #1 Winter 2002
The Photographer's Interview
by Alexandra van de Kamp
(Hotel SudAmerica, Madrid)
1. Places Because each moment we are leaving things behind—-the darkness folded into our sleep, the hesitant embrace of doorways—-I photograph what is with us in this life. We are like rain, touching places without knowing them, here, then there, and remembering so little. When was the last time you visually took down where you were—stairways, bathrooms, the luminous possibility of each window? I focus on details that occupy the margins of vision. For example, the dark light of rain at the mouth of a driveway—-the simple wetness of stones more important than the house set back from the road. And how often do we notice driveways: places on the way to somewhere else? Anything the eyes rest upon can be a home: the timid edge of windows or blossoms nestled in a bed of ferns. 2. Freeing the Eye To get ideas, I often run. This is when the world is like a film, one image blurring into another. The trees, weighed down in green, becoming the grass flowing towards the dirt at my feet. The clouds thickening ahead, darkening the sky into a backdrop for nearby flowers—- each one specific, its colors stopping the air around it. New subject matter comes to mind when my eyes are at their freest, flying through the world. I usually take notes after I shower. 3. Sources One of my favorite photographs is by Robert Adams: the sky, above, locked shut by clouds, and below, each wave carrying its own solemn band of light out into the ocean. The lushness of that water—-all the dimples and dips of its surface, and the monotonous shimmer of each wave—-saved by the camera; the where of our lives not only this room versus that, Amsterdam or London, but a patch of black water. In my early 20's, I was in Paris for the first time-- the most ornate and photogenic of cities—- and was bored. The Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Seine—-all seen through a tourist's glance. Then, one day in a side street, I photographed the greenish pane of an upper window set in a stone facade. Suddenly the city was no longer out there, but a place inside of me—-each photo a color, texture added to that world. After this, I trusted my eye, let it take in what it loved, and when it was stopped: snow thickening on stone, streets curving out of sight, I took a shot. 4. Light In my house when a light bulb burns out, I change it immediately. Our lives are stained by what we can't control: the soft purple of clouds, the light's bitter sap spilling across us. Of all physical presences on earth, light is the most celestial—-having come down from somewhere else to be on our level. With the camera, I can pin it down—-a piece of God held still—-then later in the dark room, mold it into a world whose light blooms forever. My favorite time of the day is evening. At 6pm the light, an amber-yellow, syrupy-thick, moves down windows, along bricks— soaking equally into people and things. Spain is a country of textures. The cities mere extensions of the village—-where pigs kick up dirt in the backyard and garlic cloves dry in the kitchen. Those last rays of sun catch in grooves, sink into what is supposedly solid, and remind us of our own translucence, of how we are 70% water and permeable—-our bodies just one more texture, absorbing and absorbing. 5. What Slips By I grew up in a flood zone and periodically, after heavy rain, we’d notice water creeping up our lawn and would have to leave—- spending the night at a friend's house. My mother would park the car at the top of the street beyond the reach of the rising water—- our house filling with sadness. The gray water swirled through our lives—- submerging our front steps, temporarily altering the world. Trees seemed shortened, water like a fluttering skirt around their trunks, and houses less authoritative—-their foundations swallowed in gray. Once, in a small dinghy, a neighbor rowed us through the water—-our hands trailing past leaves, beach balls, swings sets loosened from other people’s lawns. And afterwards, more chaos! Tulip bulbs uprooted in the garden, and oil-slicks from the basement burner cutting black, sticky paths through the grass. Each moment is a shipwreck of details. See the bowl of fruit on top of that table? The way the light cuts across that fruit at 3pm today you will never see again. We are on a sinking ship, a diminishing land with our lives churning past us. I try to grab what slips by—-that constant washing away of objects, places, corners of beds in hotel rooms like this one. Even our eyes swim in liquid, shakily moored in sockets, rocking this way, then that, in their attempts to make out the world around us. 6. Blessing Things I want to anchor the seen down, hold what moves still, catch a doorway in a certain light, so that someone notices something they might have otherwise missed. And I believe in paying respects to the world that has carried me up until this moment, so I could be in this hotel room talking to you. In the Catholic Church they say Father, Son and the Holy Ghost when they bless things. I bless things too, but I say with the camera's mute eye look at this chair, this book, this window. And gentlemen, it's been a pleasure, but I believe it's time to eat—-Southern European style with the slow weight of the sun moving across your table. Each object caught by the light, then released, and your hands choosing a spoon, then a napkin, then the light touching you before it leaves behind just a few more shadows.
©2002 Alexandra van de Kamp
Alexandra van de Kamp has been previously published in journals such as: Red Rock Review, Poetry Northwest, the Seattle Review, the Greensboro Review, The Mystic River Review, Branches, Talking River Review, Washington Square, Ekphrasis, The Brooklyn Review and Poems & Plays. She has poems forthcoming in Ekphrasis and Hawaii Pacific Review. Her manuscript of poems, The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century, won the 2001 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize and was published by Wind Magazine in June 2002. Her translations of the emerging Spanish poets, Ángela Pérez Ovejero and Marta López-Luaces, have been published in the Canadian magazine filling Station. She is a co-founding editor of Terra Incognita, a bilingual literary journal distributed in Spain and the United States. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, William Glenn, and teaches ESL at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY.