"What We Want" — New Voodou

As a follow-up to the exceptional session—Photographing with Intention—that instructor Aline Smithson led this summer at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, she shared an inspiring article from the New York Times. For "Being Women: Poetry and Imagery" the editors selected six poems by women and asked several women photographers to let the poems inspire them. The result was mesmerizing; the photos became poems of their own.

Having spent a week with the talented photographers in the workshop, I thought it would be interesting to see how they would respond to the same kind of challenge. And how would I? Volunteering, I selected two poems that were rich in verbal imagery: Mary Olivier's "Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond"and Linda Pastan's "What We Want".

As a graduate student in French literature, I have done my fair share of translation and understand that word for word translations often miss the intended meaning and there isn't always an exact equivalent word in the other language. That's what you get with Google translations. More often there's a cultural or emotional shading that asks for thoughtful interpretation of meaning rather than a simple translation.

Camera in hand, that's what I tried to do as I created images inspired by "What We Want".

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names--
now they want us.

But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.

We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.