Filed under: Armchair Travel, Art Gallery, Library Shelf | Tags: 'emile zola', 'eudora welty', 'julia margaret cameron', 'lewis carroll', art, literature, photography, victorian, writing
I’m drawn to writers who turned to photography or photographers turned writers or artists who choose to do both because this is me. I’m always looking for answers as to how the two arts coexist in a creative mind. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to accept that both exist inside of me. I came to photography more recently, and I’ve always identified as a writer.
I’ve been a closet photographer for years, living in denial every time I’d go for my camera instead of sitting in front of the computer to write stories. In grad school, my friend Dan and I would spend afternoons going for drives, looking for places to take pictures when we both should have been writing (he’s a writer too, although he is a talented photographer as well), but instead we told stories through the lens.
Julia Margaret Cameron was a late-Victorian photographer who explored literature and mythology through portraiture. Prior to her turning to photography at the age of 48, she was an aspiring writer who was friends with the likes of Alfred Tennyson and Henry Taylor. Learning this bit of information, I now study her photographs in a completely different way. Why did she abandon writing? What made her embrace photography with such enthusiastic fearlessness? She would still make a print from a cracked glass negative just to preserve the image.
Sappho c. 1866
Lewis Carroll’s photography was considered merely a hobby, but has now gained respect in the art world, as well as generated controversy with his photos of naked children. With his mathematician’s attention to detail, he viewed photography as more of a science to be explored rather than an art.
After reading one of my favorite creepy novels of all time, Therese Raquin, I was curious to discover that Emile Zola was also a closet photographer. I have been trying to find examples of his work online, but I only came across this self-portrait from someone’s Flickr page.
While browsing at Barnes & Noble one afternoon this past spring, I bought The Well and the Mine simply because of the photograph of a barefoot young girl sitting on a porch railing. Eudora Welty had taken the photograph when she worked for the WPA during the Great Depression. In a New York Times 1989 interview, Welty is modest about her photographs, calling them ’snapshots.’ I was hoping, as the interviewer seemed to hope, that Welty would make connections with photography and writing, let us in on the big secret – did one art fuel the other?
Welty compared her photographic ’snapshots’ to short stories in that each, if done well, captures a moment that could have been lost. She had proposed a book of short stories accompanied by her photographs to her publisher in the 1950s, but there wasn’t a market for this sort of project. Knowing that she was also a photographer allows me to read her fiction through the eye of her lens.
I found the Lonely Planet book, Experimental Travel, in Ollie’s Bargain Outlet in Greensburg (if you haven’t been to an Ollie’s, and you are driving through small town USA, you really need to pull over and check out one, especially if you are into drugstore overstock and bargain book tables). It’s a ‘how to’ book of off-beat exploration experiments to try when you are broke, afraid, have tried everything crazy there is to do when you travel or if you are just a boring person who has to be told how to think creatively.
But what I love most about this book is that it affirms my views on travel as being not just about physically going to a place, but about stepping outside of your everyday world and into another world. In the chapter “Domestic Travel,” the author asks readers to do just that: Trade places with a family member or friend and live their life for one day, or even a week. “Literary Journey” asks us to walk over to our bookshelves or local libraries and simply read. I spent most of my childhood (and adulthood) buried in books – I love their smell, the cover art, an irregular book size, their tight, clean pages crinkling as I turn them to find out what happens next. They are portable worlds. When I can’t go anywhere, books or exploring my neighborhood as a tourist are all I have to escape ordinary life on days when I really need it.
These suggestions seem really obvious, but it’s hard to put into words sometimes why travel is so much a part of me. I am always dreaming about the next adventure. I remind myself that travel is not about the place, but the people who make up that place. Sometimes I can remember in faded terms the names of monuments or city streets, but I can remember very strongly the people who have affected me.
I miss Tamara in Nova Gorica and Andrija in Osijek and in my mind’s eye I am walking along the train tracks in Nova Gorica. It is March, very windy, my hands in my red coat pockets. There are palm trees planted in somebody’s back yard on the Italian side of the border, in contrast to the Julian Alps view on the Slovene side. I have a few weeks till I am home again in the States, but I don’t yet know this. It is just enough to be here with no plan, even though it is frightening. It is where I am meant to be at that moment.
Filed under: Armchair Travel, Library Shelf, Pennsylvania, United States | Tags: Armchair Travel, books, cookbook, culinaria, Hungary, isabelle eberhardt, l'engle, nancy drew, reading, United States
Some books to read when you can’t go anywhere
The Moon by Night by Madeline L’Engle
Madeline L’Engle is better known for her science fiction rather than her spiritual writings in the Episcopal church, but it’s her non science fiction chronicles that make me love her writing so much. The church I attended as a kid was chockfull of her young adult books, and The Moon by Night was one of my favorites. In the second book of the Austin family series, Vicky Austin confronts growing pains and first love while traveling cross-country with her family in a ramshackle camper. While the thoughts of traveling with my own family would have me running for the hills, I always thought it would be so cool to live in a house on wheels, and I loved the groovy 1970s bookcover, and the interconnected world of L’Engle characters.
Nancy Drew Mystery Series
Who the hell knows which state River Heights actually exists, but it’s in close proximity to New York City and Chicago, as well as Shadow Ranch, Moonstone Castle and the ghostly Blackwood Hall. I was always envious that Nancy and her chums were lucky enough to encounter mysterious mannequins in Turkey, or solve crimes in such exotic locales as Japan and Scotland. They had all the time and money in the world. It wasn’t until I was an adult who could afford her own travels that I asked, how did Nancy do it? When I want to escape to the Forgotten City, I think of eating tea sandwiches at roadside inns, lunch always interrupted by the next adventure.
Culinaria Hungary
This beautiful cookbook is more travelogue than recipe collection. With its stunning photography and detailed historical research, each region of Hungary comes to life through the pages. It makes me want to climb into the book and emerge from Budapest on the other side.
The Oblivion Seekers by Isabelle Eberhardt
Isabelle Eberhardt was a late-Victorian female traveler who spent much of her time primarily in Algeria. She dressed in men’s clothes, converted to Islam and traveled through the North African deserts alone. Unlike Isabella Bird or Gertrude Bell, women travelers who made a living through their travel writings, Isabelle was addicted to morphine which often clouded her judgment as well as hampered her writing ability. The Oblivion Seekers, translated by Paul Bowles, is more a collection of diary-like pieces rather than short stories. Most of her journals were washed away in a flash flood, which killed her at the age of 27.
