It seems wildly fortuitous that I get these scans back from @glazersphotolab on World Photography Day, as this kind of portrait has become a bit of a minor tradition of ours as well, having started it in Priest Lake two summers ago. It’s touristy and twee, but it means a lot more to me than you could possibly imagine, so doing it in the waters home to Costa Rica’s “Salsa Brava” just takes the ritual to another level.
Here are the very first and last shots I took on this waterproof Fujifilm Quicksnap, connecting the Carribean to Lake Washington, with our last day on a catamaran in Guanacaste in between.
It’s also appropriate to post these today because Christine’s going to have to accept that she doesn’t just have a camera — she’s a photographer.
Happy World Photography Day to all who celebrate.
The black sands of Playa Negra have a fascinating way of fading in and out of the paler sand more typically associated with (and valorized in) the Carribean; you can even see it in the holes that burrowing crabs make, sometimes spitting the tan out through the black, and other times, the reverse, like some inside-out Oreo. There’s a metaphor there for the blending of boundaries in this region, where locals, expats, and tourists seem to coexist more naturally than most places we’d been.
Looking back at these photos now, though, I’m also thinking about the surprising resilience of our boundaries as subjects; I joked on the catamaran about how the foreignness of that boomer expat milieu to my lifeworld and the general ick they were giving me was ameliorated by our being part of the backdrop to a core memory of a grandchild that was also among us. It wasn’t really a joke because I meant it.
I wonder what backdrops we’ve been part of throughout this trip; I could feel the main character energy of certain people, which drew my finger towards the shutter button that I sometimes actually fired, but that’s the extent of our engagement. Now all I have are pictures and curiosity.
It’s funny because, without other people in them, some of these beachside views started blending together. Which one was at the Pacific? Which was the Caribbean? Which was in the north? Which was in the south?
It reminds me of a utopian image from a post-war essay on Beirut that found freedom in the placelessness of the sea where there are no divisions or conflicts.
I always found it wrongheaded and proto-fascistic to project human flourishing onto the boundlessness of open water. Real relations are on the shore. The water is temporary.
“…memorymakers don’t always succeed in creating the images they want and in having them understood in the ways they intended…”
That’s a quote from a different register of officialdom, but I think it applies to areas of micro-practice as well.
In any case, I think I’d call these a success.