Something started me thinking about my roots, about where I come from, about my homeland, and how desolate the feeling is between what I think and the reality which lives so far from me. I don”t know when the last time I talked to a Californian. Someone who knows what it means to drive the freeway with the windows down and the stereo up next to good friend with nowhere n particular to go. Is this an LA thing? A Californian thing? Are we the only ones who call it the “freeway?” Why when I describe my homeland to strangers do I inevitably turn to descriptions of the desert? Why do the sand and the dust and the dry dry cacti figure so heavily in my makeup? Why do those mountains so far off in the smog-smeared distance loom so large in my mind? Do I miss the road that much? Why do stories of Uncle Don calling drunk from a payphone circa 1967 saying he lost his car on I-10 going to Indio and doesn”t know where he is mean so much to me? Is this who I am? A part of me? Am I myself or the place I am from? Or both? Is there sagebrush in my blood? The Pacific? Am I so a part of the great western migration manifesto that I believe only the strongest survived while moving wagons westward yet parts of us continue to slowly erode away like the coastline due to no longer having territory to conquer? Our own inner space spectacles the only place left over which to assume eminent domain, are we doomed?
This may be in part due to the fact that I took a boat ride today on the ocean. That which felt normal…finally. Great in the rare experience way yet good like home. Think about the last time you were on a boat in the ocean and remember how you felt. Recall the smell of salt and the hunger which arose in your belly. Remember the pangs your stomach felt while lurching across wakes of boats bigger than you will ever be. Relive the lusty freedom you felt in your gut while skiing across fluid liquid you can no more define than the inner workings of your psyche. Do all this and then note the ease this big blue aqua beast puts you in while being completely indifferent to your humanity.
Is it Los Angeles, my home, the desert, or the sea, the ocean, the Pacific, that I miss so desperately? Or is the idea of one bleeding onto the other? Do the desert and the sea have a meeting place? Are they secret siamese twins, joined at hidden hips by unknown tissues? Am I a part of that wicked epoxy?
This isn’t well written nostalgia. The fact remains I don’t want to to return to L.A. A year and a half taught me what that”s like: poverty and solitude. This is merely a questioning of my roots. Where am I from? From where do I hail? Is that me? Am I this place? Do we share common traits? Are our common metaphors similar? And finally, will I ever feel at home anywhere, with anyone again?
I am a documentary and portrait photographer, specializing in a raw approach to shooting everything under the sun. Though I travel abroad often, I am currently based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and am available for assignments throughout North America and beyond.
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All content © 2012 by Manny Santiago Photography