Meeting Paula again
Monday, October 16th, 2006When I was in Portugal in July, in what seems now like a former life, I stumbled onto a not-yet-opened exhibit of photographs by a woman named Paula, with testimonies of women who, like herself, had been political prisoners in Argentina. I wrote about our meeting with great joy, because in the midst of my pilgrimage, meeting Paula was in some ways like walking through a mirror. Not that I mean to flatter myself. She she is younger than I by more than a decade, beautiful, brilliant, confident, successful in her art and in her life. None of that mirrors anything to do with me. But we hum to a similar frequency, and she shows me facets of myself I couldn’t see clearly till I met her and saw her work. Her pictures of walls, stairways, grills, barriers, stains, pipes, and rags explore a prisoner’s landscape. Her pictures are landscapes of trauma and violence, landscapes of survival, walls we build to protect ourselves, walls that, once constructed, are difficult to take down. I spent Sunday afternoon with Paula again, as she has come to Houston in connection with the next Fotofest, scheduled for March, 2008, by which time I will have gone on to whatever comes next in my life. [read on]
Kendall