MARÍA DEGUZMÁN is a scholar, photographer, writer, and music composer. Her photographic work has been exhibited at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA, USA), Watershed Media Centre (Bristol, England), and Golden Belt Studios (Durham, NC, USA). She has published photography in Typehouse Literary Magazine, Apricity, Phoebe, deLuge Journal, and MER; creative nonfiction photo-text in Oyster River Pages; photo-text flash fiction in Oxford Magazine, The Bangalore Review, and Bombay Gin; visual poetry in TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Roanoke Review, 45th Parallel, Inverted Syntax, The Banyan Review, and La Piccioletta Barca; and short stories in Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas and Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature. Her SoundCloud website may be found at: soundcloud.com/mariadeguzman.
These photographs of shifting water document overlooked uncanny hydrodynamics. “Forms of Life in the Clouds,” “Runner of the Sparks,” and “Sophia’s Scythe” pertain to a larger series titled “Glimpses of the Light World” and are derived from my curiosity about intersections between hydrology, optics, phenomenology, photography, and the experience and study of consciousness. These images are not manipulated, nor are they produced by water-gobbling AI. Instead, they result from the camera’s freezing of water or patterns of light and shadow in water that has been stirred up or agitated. These images constitute a sort of optical unconscious, what surpasses our ability to see in the moment, but that is, nevertheless, there, as the photographic process reveals. However, what is “there” involves continual interpretive perception on the part of viewers, myself included.
Artist Statement
Sophia's Scythe
Runner Of The Sparks
Forms of life in the clouds
Volume 15.1, Winter 25
María DeGuzmán
