Face of Fire

María DeGuzmán

The photographic image was obtained by agitating water with a spoon in a small bowl and photographing the water, illuminated by candlelight, while stirring it. The naked eye cannot see what is happening at the time. The camera captures relations between chaos and order, formlessness and form, what eludes the naked eye and what takes shape - sometimes quite detailed shape. What intrigued me about the experiment I conducted with light, water, and motion was the eerie coherence of chaos, caught on camera, that appeared in a bowl of water being stirred with a spoon. It is a coherence that haunts, with a warning.

María DeGuzmán is a scholar, conceptual photographer, and music composer / sound designer. She has published photography in The Grief Diaries, Coffin Bell, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Map Literary, Two Hawks Quarterly, and The Halcyone (forthcoming); a creative nonfiction photo-text piece in Oyster River Pages; poetry in The Kentucky Poetry Review, The Cape Rock, and Empty Mirror; and short stories in Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, and Sinister Wisdom. She has also published three scholarly books: Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (Minnesota Press, 2005); Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (Indiana University Press, 2012); and Understanding John Rechy (University of South Carolina Press, 2019). Her SoundCloud website may be found at: https://soundcloud.com/mariadeguzman.