Ep 022: Josefina Santos
A SHOT: So to start, can you describe this photo that we’re going to talk about?
JOSEFINA SANTOS: Yeah, this photo was taken in Colombia, in Sucre, which is a town where my mom’s from. It was one of the first photos that I took for my ongoing project “Sucre,” which I started in about 2016. This was during Semana Santa, which is Easter. What happens is all the fisher boats and the fishermen in the area go out to celebrate, so I tagged along with one of them. I saw a bunch of kids diving from this bridge, and I was like, “Please, please can we stay here for 10 minutes?” And it was a really big group of kids that were just kind of jumping from the bridge. That’s how I got that shot. It was one of the first that I’m including in the book, hopefully.
So you were there with your camera because you were taking pictures of something else?
Yeah, so I wanted to take pictures of the boating route and all the fishermen because they go in groups, and it’s kind of like this big celebration, and they drink, and I was like, “Something interesting might pop up here.” I didn’t really end up featuring any of the photos I was there to take. This was kind of a nice surprise that ended up making it into the project.
So when you’re in a situation like this, what sort of things are you looking for? What makes you want to take a photo here?
In this situation, I was just trying to do something new. I was trying to get immersed a little bit more in the culture. My cousins recommended… They were like, “You might like this. You might not like this, but just check it out.” So in these types of situations when I’m starting a project, I’m not trying to look for anything specific. I’m trying to just be really open and really aware and try to take everything that comes at me because I think if I try to look for something very specific, I won’t see what starts to develop right in front of me.
Is taking pictures the goal of the day, or is it more observational?
It’s never really like, “Ah, how many pictures did I take today? Did I get that shot or not?” To me, it’s a little bit more about, “Who did I meet today? What did I see? What did I learn? And is there something I can come back to?” because there’s someone that I saw that I thought was really interesting that maybe I can go and look for next and ask for a portrait, or if I really liked this little café that I found, I wanna go back and maybe photograph there. To me it’s more about what did I learn today and is that something I can use later on or is that something that I can come back to. And if I get a good picture in the day when I’m in the investigation part of the project, great.
What’s your setup when you’re taking a photo like this?
Oh, it’s just my camera. One camera. I was on the boat. At the time I was using the Pentax 67. It was my first time using a camera like that. This was my introduction to medium-format cameras. Those cameras are super-finicky, and I remember, at that time and on this trip, that camera stopped working. It got some salt-water splashed onto it, and it eroded in a matter of days. So I remember being really frustrated and always having a digital camera as a backup, but I really didn’t want to use it. But for this setup, and for really this entire project, it was just one camera on hand, film, that’s it.
What do you like about the process of working that way?
It give me more focus. I don’t have to think about everything else. I have the camera on the hand. It also makes you a little more inconspicuous, not that those cameras are… Those cameras are huge. People notice them. They’re not silent. When you take a shot, people know. But at least I have to worry about one thing. One camera, the film, and then whatever I’m photographing. I don’t have to think about anything else. I don’t have to think about changing cameras or lenses. I kind of just pick a lens for the day. If I’m gonna go do a walk-around or if I’m hoping to take a portrait, I choose a lens and then just stick to that lens that day, so I don’t have to worry about anything else. At that time — this was back in 2016 when I was really just starting to photograph — I kind of learned by doing and learned all the mistakes. It was a really long process because I was living in New York at the time but then doing this project in Colombia. If I messed up — I messed up a lot — I would have to come back to Colombia, plan another trip. It made me learn very quickly. But it also helped that I was a little more focused, that I wasn’t bringing any more variables in.
So how aware was your subject in this photo that you were taking a picture? Did he know that you were going to try to get a photo of this happening?
Yeah, so they got super excited. I asked the boatman to stay idle for a couple minutes. [The kids] were all jumping into the water and then going back out and doing it again. It was a big group of kids, so I kind of just gestured, and they started to get really into it. They started to do flips. There’s a whole series [of photos] of kids jumping off of this bridge. I did get approval, and they were like, “We’re going to show off a little bit for you.”
How important is it that you are making them aware of you?
It depends on what I’m photographing, and it depends on the shot. But it gives me a sense of “Okay, I can come in here.” It gives me a sense of “Okay, maybe do that again.” It gives me a little more freedom to ask for more things, I think, instead of just kind of taking that one shot and walking away.
Are you giving them direction like that? Like, saying, “Oh, yeah, but try to do this next time?”
No, I was letting them do their thing, but if one of them did a cool backflip, I’d be like, “Oh, please do that again.” And I can make sure I have a shot of that.
So how did this series of images [“Sucre”] begin? And what images were you looking to include in it, at this point?
I’m from Colombia. I was born and raised in Bogotá. And my mom’s from this really small town called Sucre Sincelejo. I grew up very separate from my mom’s side of the family. It started as curiosity of me wanting to go back to my mom’s side, get closer to my grandma and to my cousins. I thought it was going to be more of a family project. But when I started going more to this town, the project just kind of opened up. It became much more of what was going on outside and what the people in the town were doing and what it was like than inside. A lot of my family is still scattered in the project because they’re part of this town and they’re part of this story I’m telling, but I just found such a magical realism going on in the day to day of Sincelejo that, to me, it became much more about that. It became much more about where can I find these little moments that represent that.
So what does an image like this add to this series? And to some extent, how can we see that this is an image that is one of the first images that you took?
Maybe in the sense that, you know when you start a project and you’re green and you don’t overthink things? I’ve done so many sequences. I’ve done so many selections. This project could really be five different projects just because of the different selections that I’ve done and the different ways there is to tell the same story. And one of the things I keep going back to is the first photographs that I took, that I maybe at the moment really didn’t like or I was being too hard on myself, like, “Aw, this is blurry,” or like, “This isn’t properly exposed.” Things like that. But there was a sense of no strings attached. I wasn’t thinking too much about anything. I wasn’t looking for something specific, where I think once you’re years into a project, you’ve thought about it so much that things start to get cloudy. So I think this image particularly and this series of images have a freshness to them and a lightness. It doesn’t seem overly composed because it was one of the first images that I took and I was more free at that moment when I was working on this. So I keep going back to those, and I keep trying to put myself in those shoes and remember how I was approaching things to see if I can get a little bit more back into that.
You’ve said that an element of your work comes from balancing, as a Colombia immigrant, the feeling of being both an outside and an insider. To what extent do you feel like an outsider when you’re taking a photo like this?
Very much so. When I’m in America, I don’t feel completely American even though I’ve been in New York for 12 years now. And when I’m in Colombia, I don’t feel fully Colombia because I’ve been in America for so long. And that was a feeling that I really started to feel when I started this project because I was also coming into a side of my family but also as an outsider. This entire project has been me feeling like an outsider but then also finding my place. I don’t feel as much of an outsider within this situation as much now, but I think with images like this and with situations like this, you are very much an outsider. It’s part of seeing something special in their everyday life. For example I remember my cousin being like — she was there with me — she was like, “Why are you taking photos of that? Why is that interesting? They do that every day.” This is new to me. This is special to me. I’m seeing it with fresh eyes. And I see something special in this. So I am very much an outsider. But as I’ve worked on it, I’ve also found my place within all these images and where I belong as well.
I mean, to some extent, what do you want to say?
I just want to give this place a chance. I want to give this place a voice. The story of Colombia is so one-sided. And it’s funny because even within Colombia, the story of Sucre is still very one-sided because it’s very corrupt and very poor and even within Colombia, there’s just one story to this one place. I want to show something different. I want to show what I see, which is very different from what people say or what people think. It’s not one specific thing I’m saying. I kind of just want to present another side of the story.
So as a project like this expands, you have a lot of ownership over a subject when you’re approaching it from the perspective of family because it’s your family, and no one’s gonna say, “You can’t cover that,” or “You can’t cover that in that way,” because it’s your family. You have ownership of it. But as you expand a project and include other people, I would get the sense that you would start to feel a responsibility toward the subjects that you’re featuring.
Absolutely, and why am I featuring them, and what’s my place? This is my mom’s hometown. I can go out and photograph people that live there because there’s a part of me that is also from this place. But to me, in the moment, when I’ve been photographing, I don’t think I’ve ever felt that I’m intruding on anyone, even with portraits. Actually most of the portraits in this project are subjects looking into the camera. So I think there’s a mutual agreement and mutual understanding when you take a photograph like that. At the beginning, it was very much so me being curious and me being like, “Tell me about yourself. Tell me about this place.” I would go into establishments. There’s a ton of Virgin [Marys] and Christs made out of gesso. There’s a ton of little stores of that. So there was one point where I was really interested in photographing those stores and then the women that worked there and the owners. So to me, I was coming in from a place of being invited and being curious and asking people about themselves and what they did and what this was about. I was coming from an angle of “I wanna know about you. I wanna know about this place. I wanna know about how that can relate to me.” Again I keep going back to finding my own place within this town and finding my own story.
I don’t know how much you’ve thought about this, but what responsibility do you think that you have to your mother with images like this?
Yeah, it’s really interesting. My mom’s a writer. And my mom wrote and published this book. It took her, like, 10 years to write, and she published it in 2019. It was a childhood memoir about growing up in this place. When I read the manuscript, I felt recognized. I felt like I knew this place. I felt like I knew the people. There was something about me that I was like, “I feel like I’ve been here before,” and I’d only been there before a couple times. But of course, my mom is from there. I was still very much connected. And that’s kind of what propelled this project. So it was very cathartic in a way where my mom released this book and released this… She kind of birthed this baby with her childhood memoirs. She let go of that as I was coming into it.
She’s excited to see how I see it. We overlap on a lot of things. And she actually helped me a lot because she was the one that was very curious about how I was gonna see it. And a lot of the stories in her memoir are stories that I see kind of trickled into… Not stories, but little moments that she describes that are really magical realism, I started to see those moments, and I’ve started to recognize what makes something extra special in this place through the camera. So it’s been a really nice partnership in a way. She’s seen all the pictures from the beginning. And she’s seen how it’s changed.
I’m still not done. It’s still in progress. I guess she’s also like, “Please, don’t take 10 years,” because it took her 10 years to write that. So she was like, “Whatever you do, release it because it’s gonna change. Every year it’s gonna change because you change.” And it’s something that’s very personal as well. Even if it is about a place, you’re still connected to it really personally. So she was like, “At one point you just have to let it take its own life. Release it, and let it take its own life.”
So outside of simply finding this scene and realizing it would make a great photo, where does an image like this come from for you? And I guess I’m sort of asking, outside of this spark with your mom’s book, what’s a deeper source of desire to make a photo like this — not just make a photo like this, but then also make it something public that you want to share with the world?
When I first encountered this, and then every single time I’ve been back, I’ve seen, not the same group of kids, but kids jumping off from this bridge. It’s like something they do every single... after school. Like, if you go to that bridge at 6pm, people are gonna be jumping off of it. So to me, it was like, okay, first, now that becomes a cultural thing, but to me it also just represents joy, like very simple teenage joy. And it’s something that I do want to show in that book. I do want to show happiness in Colombia and cheer. It can be as simple as that, as well. What can you get out of jumping off a bridge if it’s not pure joy. There doesn’t need to be a deeper meaning to that.
So when we were e-mailing about images to talk about, we were also considering some photos that you’d taken during a trip to India. And the thing that I noticed about those images is that it was a lot of people turned away from the camera or people from behind. Whereas the photos that you take in Colombia, it’s clear that not only are you able to engage with your subjects, but you yourself seem to be much more comfortable making images in just how much you’re showing. Subjects are font-facing, often closer in. This may be an obvious questions, but how would you describe the difference in how you feel here?
Well, I think one of the main things is communication. I’m a person first. Even if I’m on a trip to take pictures, even if that’s the goal, you’re a person first. I don’t even have the camera… The camera is, like, slinged to the back. I’m looking. I’m making eye contact. If I like something, if I see a situation, if I see a person that I like, first I always try and go talk to them. And that’s kind of the first thing: making contact. And of course that’s going to be way easier in Colombia just because I speak the language. In the coast of Colombia, people are very friendly. People are curious about you. A lot of the times, I don’t even approach the subject. They approach me. Like, “Oh, you have a camera. Take my picture. Take my picture,” things like that.
In India, the thing that I had a tough time with was that initial communication, that initial mutual understanding, agreement. So even though I did take a lot of pictures that in India were front-facing — because you can, at the end of the day, communicate body language; you’ll find a way — but in India, I kind of didn’t want to impose. I feel like that’s where I was holding back a bit. Because in Colombia, I do feel very comfortable, and I am okay approaching people, and I am okay asking. In India, I didn’t want to impose that much. So I was there for a couple weeks thankfully, and I feel like, at the end, I was starting to get a little bit more the type of shots that I got in Colombia. I was feeling a little more comfortable. I was, even with just hand gestures and little words that I learned, starting to communicate and starting to be able to talk to people, even on the street. Honestly, that’s what I’m looking for: if I can have a conversation with someone.
This image is part of a contact sheet that you show with the other images you shot of the people diving into the water. What effect do you think it has on this image when you take it away from the contact sheet and show it on its own?
It shows more intimacy because the contact sheet immediately makes it action because you see all the different people jumping. And what’s fun about a contact sheet is also you see my process, and you see what I like, and you see, you know, if I ask someone to do something twice. But it becomes much more action, and it becomes much more what choices I took. Something like this, it immediately brings it back to the subject and me, our intimacy, our connection, our relationship. The contact sheet I think takes that out of it.
To me, the contact sheet feels like a document of something that’s happening in front of you, whereas this image on its own feels almost like a memory.
Absolutely.
How important is memory to your work?
Very important. You were talking about responsibility before, and I do feel like creating work and creating a body of work about a place in the way of what you’ve said or what you’ve created, how will that look like in 10 years? What will that be? You are capturing a place in time. Even if what you wanted to say or not happens, what you’ve done has captured a place in time. The memory of that stays. You might try to have control of that and try to have control of what you want to say, but there’s two different things: You shoot something, and then that captures it, and then that moment is there. What you do with it later… And this is sort of also what goes into a project like this. One thing is shooting it and what you’re shooting, who you’re shooting, how you’re approaching it. But then it’s what are you saying? That’s the second part of the story, right? How are you sequencing? How are you editing your story? That’s a whole different part of it.
With this particular project… So I have contact sheets of everything. Of every single roll I’ve done, I have a contact sheet, and at one point, one of the editors that was helping me with this, he was like, “What if it’s just this? What if it’s just the contact sheets? What if it’s just no intervention? What if it’s really just this?” And I was excited about that because the contact sheets show it with no intervention. I shot it. So that’s a sense of editing. I chose to photograph that person, that place in that moment. That’s me already editing out a lot of other things from the place in that moment. So what if it’s just the contact sheets? That would be a very poignant memory of that place in that time, whereas if I do the many dummies that I’ve done and the many sequences that I’ve done, which have been more carefully chosen and sequenced, I’m inserting myself much more in that story. That’s where “What do I wanna say?” really comes in.
So it’s kind of living between these two worlds. It’s one of those things where I’m trying to take my ego out of it because I was like, “Okay, if I want to tell a story of this place, the contact sheets make more sense.” It’s unfiltered. It’s dirty. It’s ugly. It’s beautiful. But then I see an image like this on its own and the level of intimacy it represents, and I also wanna tell that story.
So I like the tension that’s happening in this photos because by freezing this moment, you’re not letting this person do what they want to do, which is dive into the water. What do you think a tension like that adds to this photo?
You kind of feel how hard his feet touch the water. I feel like you can almost touch it, kind of like the water’s almost splashing on you. It made for a very dynamic shot in the moment.
I think that the interesting thing too about it is, depending on how you’re feeling that day, you could approach this with a completely different mood. You could look at this and just see the excitement of diving into water, or you could look at this and see this closed-eye expression on his face and get almost a sense of fear or anxiety from it.
Yeah, oh, yeah. Which is funny you say that because that was very much the tension that was happening in that moment. Some of them were super excited to jump. I think he was one of the ones that jumped the most. He had no fear. But you could see the tension up in the bridge of people that were like “Oh, no. I don’t know.” And that is always the tension when you’re going to jump off something like that. You’re like, “Wait, no, yes. Now, now, now.” So that is very much the tension that was happening in real life, as well.
What about this photo feels familiar?
It feels like home. There’s a childhood sort of sense to it of freedom and carelessness. I feel like when I go back to Colombia, I kind of revert a little bit more to when I was a child and when I was a teenager. I just feel a little more free, especially working on this project now, because when I go back to New York, I sometimes have to go back into that hustle mode of making things happen, whereas in Colombia and thinking about this photo, it’s just people spending their afternoon jumping off a bridge and diving into the water. It feels like childhood.
How important is that element of home to this series?
Very much. Throughout this series, I started out with it being much more of me as a spectator, outside looking in. And I think I’ve now proudly become a part of it and feel like there is a place for me there and that I belong. So for me, it was very much me finding my place within Sincelejo and within Sucre and within this town. Working on it, it offered a place for me. It does feel like home even though it maybe didn’t at the beginning, and definitely when I shot this photo, I remember it not feeling at home at all. And I remember the first few times I went, it was very hard because I felt very out of place, very out of place, with my family, with the town, with what I was doing. I had to give it time. I kind of expected it to open itself up to me just because I felt like I had the right because my mother was from there, so I was like, “Oh, you know, this is part of my heritage.” But then you have to give a project like this and a place like this the respect and time, like you have to nurse it. It feels like home now. I’m Colombian. I was born in Colombia, but then now, I feel like I’m accepting that fact that America is also, and New York particularly, is also where I’m from now. Now this place is also where I’m from. It has a part in me, and it has a part of who I am.
What have you learned as a photographer that’s given you the instinct to take a photo like this?
I think patience is a big thing. Not getting too wrapped up into how many pictures did you take one day. Having time, time and patience, for a project like this. Yeah, for sure. And also, always go back to discarded photos. And also that a project will always tell you what it needs to be if you give it time. And I’m saying this for a personal project and something that I want to make a book out of. When I first started, I was like, “I wanna do the selection, and I wanna get the book out now, and I wanna do all this,” and I’m so glad that I didn’t because so many things have opened up within that time because I’ve given it time, and I’ve taken breaks, and I’ve gone back to it… Time and perspective and patience, those are the big ones.
So to close the conversation, what’s something unrelated to photography that’s been feeding you creatively lately?
Food, very much. My boyfriend’s an amazing cook. I don’t help him at all. It’s one of those things. But I think just seeing him cook — and maybe that’s something that quarantine we all shared together — but seeing him sort of grow into what we’re cooking, what we’re doing, and just making something with our hands, something that you can just eat and then that’s it and then just think like, “Okay, what are we going to do the next day?” Food has been something that, in the moment, just takes you out of everything else and you just kind of get to enjoy without thinking about anything else.
Interviewed on April 29, 2021.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)
Links:
Josefina Santos
The Cut: “Portrait of a Place: Sucre, Colombia”