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.

“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

“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

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

“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

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)