Josephine Sacabo Photography

Sanctuary

In 1973 I arrived in New Orleans from France and began my work as a street photographer in the French Quarter. I was amazed by the richness of the life in those streets.   It was in fact a sanctuary for all kinds of people and activities – musicians, fortune tellers, tap dancers, strippers, eccentrics of every stripe – people from different worlds gathered in one small neighborhood.

At the time, I was reading Baudelaire’s great Spleen de Paris about wandering the streets of Paris, and New Orleans seemed to me as much a city of symbols and correspondences as his Paris of the 19th century. SANCTUARY is what I saw as a ‘flâneur’ in the French Quarter from 1973 to 1987.

Le Diable Au Corps

There exists a long history in art of depicting pain and suffering as devils in the flesh – Goya, Blake, Bosch etc. These images are simply my version of that metaphor.

DISQUIET

In this short series I wanted to show the invisible struggles within – secrets not to be shared in an uncertain world.  What may lie behind the surface of a beautiful face.

An appeal to look deeper in ourselves and others and find solace in shared pain.

LE DIABLE AU CORPS

There exists a long history in art of depicting pain and suffering as devils in the flesh – Goya, Blake, Bosch etc. These images are simply my version of that metaphor.

THOSE WHO DANCE

“…THOSE WHO DANCE WERE CALLED INSANE BY THOSE WHO COULD NOT HEAR THE MUSIC” – NIETZSCHE

THIS SERIES IS AN HOMAGE TO NAHUI OLIN (B. CARMEN MONDRAGON), THE MUSE, ARTIST, POET, SOCIAL REBEL AND GREAT BEAUTY OF MEXICO IN THE 1920s – A WOMAN WHO MESMERIZED THE ARTISTS OF THE PERIOD – DIEGO RIVERA, DR ATL, AND EDWARD WESTON AMONG OTHERS – WITH HER EXTRAORDINARY BEAUTY, HER INTELLIGENCE, AND HER EXTRAVAGANT, UNINHIBITED BEHAVIOR.

A PRECOCIOUS FREE SPIRIT WHO BELIEVED IN THE POWER AND THE BEAUTY OF HERSELF AS A WOMAN.

A WOMAN WHO CONSIDERED HER BODY THE SHAPE OF HER SPIRIT AND REFUSED TO HIDE IT.

A WOMAN WHO LOVED PASSIONATELY AND TO EXTREMES.

A WOMAN WHOSE TEMPESTUOUS AND TORMENTED 5 YEAR LOVE AFFAIR IN A RUINED CONVENT WITH DR. ATL, FAMED PAINTER AND VOLCANOLOGIST, BECAME THE SCANDAL OF THE DAY. HE WAS TO REFER TO HER HENCEFORTH AS ‘MON DRAGON’ (MY DRAGON).

A WOMAN WHO LIVED HER SEXUALITY FREELY AND WITHOUT PREJUDICES.

A WOMAN WHO BOWED TO NO MAN OR WOMAN AND COURAGEOUSLY LIVED HER LIFE AS SHE SAW FIT.

A WOMAN WHO LOVED ART, POETRY, SEX, CATS, FLOWERS, PARIS, THE SEA AND THE SUN.

A WOMAN WHOSE EYES SPOKE VOLUMES.

A WOMAN OF POETIC DELUSIONS.

A WOMAN WHO TOOK THE SUN IN AS HER LOVER EVERY MORNING, CARRIED HIM THROUGH THE STREETS OF MEXICO CITY AND LAID HIM TO REST AT THE END OF EACH DAY.

A WOMAN WHO DAILY VISITED HER YOUNG BLIND NIECE TO READ CERVANTES, VICTOR HUGO, ALEXANDER DUMAS AND VOLTAIRE TO HER.

A WOMAN WHO AT THE DEATH OF HER LAST GREAT LOVE WITHDREW INTO SADNESS, POVERTY AND SOLITUDE.

AN OLD WOMAN WHO WITH HER SMALL GOVERNMENT PENSION FED ALL THE STRAY CATS IN THE ALAMEDA PARK OF MEXICO CITY.

A WOMAN WHO HAVING BEEN BORN INTO THE WEALTHY CONSERVATIVE MEXICAN ARISTOCRACY WAS SHUNNED BY HER FAMILY AND SUPPORTED HERSELF – BEHOLDEN TO NO ONE – FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE.

A WOMAN WHOM THE SOCIAL ELITE DECLARED INSANE AND THEREBY ERASED.

SPECIAL THANKS TO ELENA PONIATOWSKA FOR HER CHAPTER ON NAHUI OLIN IN HER BOOK “LAS SIETE CABRITAS” TO ADRIANA MALVIDO FOR HER BOOK “NAHUI OLIN” AND TO ELIZABETH GILLETTE.

Moments of Being

“What would such an inexperienced soul do without the solution that a body had been” –  Clarice Lispector

“Snapshots of the life within.

Echoes of thoughts and feelings expressed in the only terms I really understand which are those of light and shadow and the softening of edges.

The things expressed have already happened. Here they are remembered tenderly, in the repose of passion.” –  Josephine Sacabo

Salutations

To Loneliness, the reef, a star

To anything that has come to earn

The blank white canvas of our care.

– Stephane Mallarmé

Juana and the Structures of Reverie

“Thus my body builds around it room after room” – Proust

“This is the story of a woman who invents her freedom by creating an imaginary architecture made of light, scraps of memory, hopes and dreams – a permeable architecture where nothing is confined.

It is dedicated to Juana la Loca, the supposed ‘mad’ queen of Spain in the 16th century who for political motives was imprisoned for 46 years by her father, husband, and son in an architecture of darkness and stone in which she died broken and alone.”  –  Josephine Sacabo

A Geometry of Echoes

“Yo sólo soy memoria y la memoria que de mí se tenga.” – Elena Garro

“This series is dedicated to the memory of my Mother. It is the narrative of a woman’s life set around 1915. They are images of a woman seen through the eyes of a 6 year old child – impossibly beautiful as only the heart can perceive and remember her. They are the story of the original enchantment returned to me in all its force through Art.” – Josephine Sacabo

Ophelia’s Garden

“Doubtless she had made of this crystal surface an inner mirror to protect herself from the brilliant indiscretion of the afternoons.” – Stephane Mallarmé

“Ophelia in her despair goes to the water and finds this beautiful submerged world – her garden – a garden without seasons, fixed forever by the click of a shutter.

A landscape without a history or a future, existing only for the moment in which it was perceived. It is a landscape that I as a photographer can never revisit because it is no longer there. The light and the wind and the water cannot be held still and I can never be again the woman I was when these images were made.

Just as we cannot re-enter a dream, I cannot re-enter this garden or send anyone there. I can only share with the viewer what I saw when I went to the water’s edge.

A series of panoramic landscapes and a woman.”  –  Josephine Sacabo

Susana San Juan

El Mundo Inalcanzable de Susana San Juan
Homenaje a Juan Rulfo

“El Mundo Inalcanzable de Susana San Juan is a series of photographs based on the Mexican novel Pedro Páramo, a tragic myth of Mexico, by Juan Rulfo. The setting is a town in ruins; the characters, souls wandering in it, doing penance, telling their stories.

Among them is Susana San Juan, whose entire discourse is one of memory and delusions, delivered from her tomb. It is the story of a woman forced to take refuge in madness as a means of protecting her inner world from the ravages of the forces around her: a cruel and tyrannical patriarchy, a church that offers no redemption, the senseless violence of revolution, death itself.

These photographs are my attempt to depict this world as seen through the eyes of its tragic heroine. It is my homage in images to Mexico, to Juan Rulfo and to Susana San Juans everywhere who will not be possessed.

This series was created in collaboration with Jacqueline Miró and is dedicated to my daughter Iris.”  –  Josephine Sacabo

Une Femme Habitée

“I am the savage angel that fell one morning into your garden of precepts” – Huidobro

“This series was inspired by the poem ”Altazor“ a surrealist epic written by the Chilean poet Vincente Huidobro in the 1920s. It relates the journey of a cosmic being as his parachute falls through the universe – what he saw and what he felt.

I decided to tell the same story with one woman in one room. The images are illuminated moments of her spiritual journey through the darkness much like Altazor’s journey from star to star.”  – Josephine Sacabo

Lost Paradise

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels hierarchies?

…and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart; I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.

For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure…

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

isn’t it time that we lovingly freed ourselves from the beloved and quiveringly endured; as the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension…

so that gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself.

For there is no place where we can remain.

– Rainer Maria Rilke “First Duino Elegy” (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

Water & Dreams

“My transcendent experience with nature. Each time I return I find more there. Light and water and the infinite universe contained within. I am there to remember it, see it, and record it.”  –  Josephine Sacabo

Noche Oscura

[2010, MEXICO AND NEW ORLEANS, TRANSLATION OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS]

“Noche Oscura was inspired by the poem of that title, one of the greatest of all love poems in Spanish, by St. John of the Cross, the 16th century Spanish mystic. A woman waits in the night until all is quiet. She goes out into the darkness guided only by the light within, meets her lover and becomes one with him, in a state of mystical union leaving her cares abandoned among the lilies.”  –  Josephine Sacabo

Óyeme Con Los Ojos

(“Hear Me With Your Eyes”) For Sor Juana

“This series was inspired by the life and work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th century Mexican nun who was one of the greatest poets and intellectuals of the American continent. She created the most renowned salon of her time from behind the bars of her cloistered cell.

And in that cell she studied science and philosophy, wrote poems, plays, and music, and championed women’s right to intellectual and spiritual freedom.

In the end, after resisting valiantly for over 20 years, she was silenced by the Inquisition.

It is my hope that these images will break that silence and we will once again ‘hear her with our eyes.'”  –  Josephine Sacabo

Lux Perpetua

“These images are glimpses of the light that prevails even in the harshest places once the human spirit has assimilated it – images that have become a part of us beyond their meaning.”  –  Josephine Sacabo