Susana Roque

I have a lot of pages of photography in my document for the project that I am making. You'll never guess how many. Luckily, it's really easy to scroll fast  from the very bottom to the top of the document to figure out how to align these images for the story.. I am still sad about the passing of my uncle when I think about it but obviously I don't feel the same as when I began creating the story with the poetry and the pictures. I am still interested in the subject of death, memory and loss in photography because I think it is really important to discuss it collectively. The visual arts is a good way to gain insight into this experience but interestingly it is not as commonly expressed in this domain as in music. My uncle Horacio's death has made me more interested in learning about what death is from what I can gather up on the side of the shore of the living. My first memory of him was when I was about 4 years old . I passed by the  fresh small of lemon trees to sit down with him and talk about something he was collecting in that gorgeous country we shared to the bone, El Salvador.. He had a love for butterflies and he was collecting them in a folder. He also labeled them very neatly. He was teaching me all about them. He may have been about 9 years old. As you know, he loved dancing a lot. Interestingly, when I look at the wings of a butterfly under a microscope now, it reminds me of the kind of lights that you see in a dance floor, He left to the United States at the beginning of the Salvadoran civil war so although I really lucked out in having a very sweet friend that was my uncle to teach me some really cool things I did not see him much in Canada. However, I wrote to him a lot through the email. We mostly laughed together since he really found things to be pretty funny. The photography and poetry are really more about me  and my search to understand what happened and what the things that surface up along the shore can teach us about death, memory and loss. I suppose my quest, after more life experience of people coming and going around me, is less particular and more universal.

I find too many things that probably aren't that interesting to most people really nice to look at. I apologize for that. Hopefully with more and more pictures, I will be able to distinguish which are the better ones for the intention of the story. Yes, it's a tug-of-war between words and images.