text from my exhibit
“Where Secrets Hide - a tribute to my photographic lineage”
October- Novemeber, 2010 at Landhuis Bloemhof Gallery - Curaçao
with black and white photographs by Benjamin Gomes Casseres, my grandfather,
color slides by Stella (Tita) Mendes Chumaceiro, my mother
and an evening of films by Frank and Tita Mendes Chumaceiro - my father and mother
from my exhibit “Where Secrets Hide” - Bloemhof Gallery, 2010
For years I was the missing link. My grandfather and both my parents were avid amateur photographers and filmmakers, while my son Itamar Mendes-Flohr is a professional cinematographer and artist. And though I always owned a camera, I can’t say I took a serious interest in the art – it was already “occupied” by other members of my family.
My first contact with photography was as a “little model” and my grandfather, Benjamin Gomes Casseres, captured me deep in thought, at other times laughing heartily, or as the tomboy that I could also be. After a while, I stopped being aware that he was there and just would go on doing whatever I was doing, as he stood looking down into the viewfinder of his Rolleiflex in front of his belly.
Benjamin Gomes Casseres, circa 1950
Paito, as we all called my grandfather, began to photograph when my mother was born in 1913 and my grandparents had just moved to Cuba. I still have his albums with photos of my mother and her sister Luisa and their younger brother Charlie – mostly studio photos, often printed in sepia, with the children dressed up for costume parties and other special occasions. My mother told me Paito would set up a closed balcony in their house in Habana with curtains or a large painting of a landscape in the background. In 1929 my grandparents returned to Curaçao with their three Cuban-born children, where my grandfather continued to photograph until his death in 1955. In fact, the last photo he took was of me, pensively plucking a flower.
Benjamin Gomes Casseres - circa 1950
In the summer of 2006, only a few months before my uncle Charlie died, I interviewed him about Paito’s photography and he made a drawing of the camera Paito used in his earlier years as a photographer, the Graflex – a pioneering camera with extension bellows – at a time before there were light meters, not to speak of those that are built-in. Paito would send his photos to be developed in a laboratory in England and he would draw cropping lines on the contact prints and send them back to England with the negatives to be enlarged. Long before Photoshop, he could ask them to add a sky from a different photo to one of his landscapes. It must have taken a very long time to get the finished photos, when mail was mostly carried by ship across the Atlantic.
The seeds of my own love of nature and spirit of adventure were planted on the many Sunday trips with Paito to the Curaçao countryside, where he took photos of hòfis and beaches, the rocky North coast, the saltpans and old, abandoned landhuizen. These photographic excursions continued with my own parents, Frank and Tita Mendes Chumaceiro, when they made documentary films about the island, in particular, the nature film Rots en Water in 1956, which took us to climb the Christoffel from Savonet (before there was a park that laid easier access roads and trails) and enter the cave of Hato with a guide carrying a torch of a dried datu cactus.
Frank Mendes Chumaceiro filming on the Christoffel - 1956. photographer unknown
Pappie and Mammie started to make family films of my brother Fred and me as little children and went on to create a body of films with narration and music soundtracks they called Curafilms. Their studio was in our living-room and study, complete with an editing machine for splicing films and sound equipment, assisted by the writer Sini van Iterson in their very early days and later by others, most notably Jan Doedel as narrator and sound technician.
On all our excursions, Mammie took her own slides as well, having moved her artistic talents from painting to photography. Through the years, she won many prizes with her slides, and her flowers were chosen for a series of stamps of the Netherlands Antilles in 1955. In the nineteen-sixties she joined the wetenschappelijke werkgroep and continued to photograph while hiking to many lesser known parts of the island.
from slide by Tita Mendes Chumaceiro
from slide by Tita Mendes Chumaceiro
I came to photography through my own passion for hiking. For many years I hiked without a camera and wrote an as yet unpublished manuscript of reflections on hiking in the deserts of Israel, where I have been living since 1970. Or I painted inner landscapes, inspired by my experiences in the desert, which I exhibited in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It was only in the digital age that I started to photograph, at first with a lightweight point-and-shoot camera that was easy to carry around on my hikes. Now, if I leave my (significantly heavier) camera at home, I feel as if I am lacking a limb, that I am missing out on a vital dimension of the hike, one that I can experience only through the lens.
from my exhibit “Where Secrets Hide” - Bloemhof Gallery, 2010
One of my initial reservations about photography was the alleged tendency of the camera to put a barrier between the photographer and what is photographed – to turn it into an object – especially when photographing people. While hiking in nature, I began to understand that the camera can do the opposite - instead of distancing, it can bring me closer. In a landscape that is uninterrupted and continuous, the lens enables me to enter into the microcosm of the frame, unearthing a picture to which the naked eye is often blind.
from my exhibit “Where Secrets Hide” - Bloemhof Gallery, 2010
With this realization of the outsider/insider dialectic that is inherent in the act of taking photographs, I have come to better understand my own relation to the medium, being myself both an insider and outsider to my native Curaçao, which I left in 1965 to study and where I return only as a visitor. I come here with the eyes of the outsider, but with an insider’s familiarity. I am searching for something – perhaps of the past, perhaps of the hidden secrets that eluded me as a child, yet continue to fascinate me. It is through my photography that I began to look more closely at the island, becoming more and more connected, as I hiked up the Christoffel with my brother Fred from every possible (and impossible) angle or encircled many binnenwaters on long walks. I discovered that my camera can take me beyond the surface, beyond the visual, to the rhythms, the overtones - and to hidden levels of memory, secrecy and history.
from my exhibit “Where Secrets Hide” - Bloemhof Gallery, 2010
Rita Mendes-Flohr
October, 2010
for more photos by my mother and grandfather:
http://paitoandmami.blogspot.com/
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