O:JA&L Flash Discourse: Nonfiction
Craft Essay/Analysis/Explication
María DeGuzmán
SUBTLE MATERIALIZATIONS OF MEMORY
This photograph, obtained July 3, 2023, during my water and light experiments “disturbing” water with a spoon, is titled Young Girl Holding the Reins of a Translucent Hippocampus. For me, the image partly recalls Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla’s series of oil paintings of children playing on the beach at Valencia. These paintings holistically render intricate dynamics between water & light, bodies, and emotions. In particular, the July 2023 water photo spurred a recollection of Sorolla’s 1909 painting El pie herido, translated The Wounded Foot. In that painting a young girl is sitting in the swash zone of the beach examining her injured foot while another child in a sunlit hat squats beside her, looking on empathetically. The photographic image that took shape in my water bowl resembles the injured girl. Yet here she stands up and appears to be loosely holding the reins of a mythological creature, a water-horse or Hippocampus. The combination of fragility and resolute strength fascinates me. The water “composition” is vaguely remindful of another well-known Sorolla painting 1909, titled El baño del caballo, translated The Horse’s Bath.
Though Sorolla was and still is mostly known as an Impressionist style painter whose primary interest was the effects of light to which he brought the technical skills of a history and a portrait painter, he also worked as a lighting assistant in his father-in-law’s photographic studio, was attentive to the impact of photography on the arts, and employed photographic framing featuring partially “out of the frame” subjects in many of his paintings. Thus, however strange, it seems fitting that a Sorolla-like image appeared during one of my water photo sessions. This is not the first time that, for a fleeting millisecond during these sessions, a “Sorollan” image has “materialized.”
The term “Hippocampus” in the title of my photograph refers to multiple things simultaneously: the mythological seahorse of ancient Mediterranean cultures as well as to a seahorse-like structure found in both hemispheres of the brain. This bilateral structure is largely responsible for converting short-term memories into long-term ones, for spatial memory and navigation, for verbal memory, and is crucial to learning. Visual images themselves, whether photographic or otherwise, can be powerful time travel vehicles, an optical correlate to a scent—bypassing verbal language to communicate, with a galvanizing immediacy, the emotional resonances of childhood memories produced by whatever was valued by those who nurtured us and/or by what we ourselves valued. To “re-member” these things in a time of dehumanization and extinction is vital, both as an end-in-itself and as a means to practice alternative ways of being.
A question lingers. What factors or forces—beyond the supposedly internal workings of memory—produce such “mirrors” of the mind in a bowl of swirling water?
About the writer:
María DeGuzmán is a scholar, photographer, writer, and composer. Her photographic work has been exhibited at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA, USA), Watershed Media Centre (Bristol, England), and Golden Belt Studios (Durham, NC, USA). She has published photography in Typehouse Literary Magazine, Apricity, Phoebe, deLuge Journal, MER, Dulcet: Stories + Art, New Delta Review, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and Lumina: A Literary Arts Journal; creative nonfiction photo-text in Oyster River Pages; and visual poetry in TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Roanoke Review, 45th Parallel, Inverted Syntax, The Banyan Review, and La Piccioletta Barca.
Image: Young Girl Holding the Reins of a Translucent Hippocampus by María DeGuzmán (contemporary). Fine art photograph created in-camera. No technical information provided. No size specified. 2023. By permission.
Note on the image:
This piece explores overlooked uncanny hydrodynamics. Photographic images such as this one, from a larger series titled Glimpses of the Light World, are not manipulated, nor are they produced by water-gobbling AI. Instead, they result from the camera’s freezing of water or patterns of light and shadow in water that has been stirred up or agitated. These images constitute a sort of optical unconscious, what surpasses our ability to see in the moment, but that is, nevertheless, there, as the photographic process reveals. However, what is “there” involves continual interpretive perception on the part of viewers, myself included. María DeGuzmán
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