Meet photographer Josephine Sacabo, a former Laredoan,
a woman Poniatowska calls an illuminata

By María Eugenia Guerra

Pedro Páramo.
By Juan Rulfo.
Photographs by Josephine Sacabo.
Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Wittliff Gallery Series.
2002. 176 pages, $35.

Available locally at Le Passé
& soon at B. Dalton Booksellers

A friend in Austin, a former Laredoan, e-mailed to ask if I'd heard of a photographer from Laredo named Josephine Sacabo who used images of Old Guerrero in her work. I had not. Like any journalist my age, I thumbed through the white pages of the phone book to see if I could scare up any Sacabos who, if there were any, would surely be related. Nary a one did I find, so I did the next thing journalists do, I cyber searched and found Josephine Sacabo indexed at over 30 sites. Visits to a couple of those sites yielded the name of her gallery in New Orleans, which yielded her e-mail address, which allowed us to conduct the interview that follows my meaningful banter.

The Internet results pulled up an image of an accomplished talent, an educated woman well possessed of her creative powers as a photographer and a writer. A woman who in November opened a one-woman show, "The Unreachable World of Susana San Juan -- Homage to Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo," at the Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern & Mexican Photography at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos.

Of the marriage of Sacabo's images to Rulfo's words, Mexican journalist Elena Poniatowska wrote, "If photography elevates the mastery of light to the level of art, and if a literary masterpiece illuminates a universe of characters, one may conclude that the two series of images by Rulfo and Sacabo are an apprehension of ghosts, a confrontation with darkness, with shadows that resist and spur the distant light of both artists -- for light does not wield the power of shadows."

All 50 images of Sacabo's hand-toned and oil-washed silver gelatin prints in the Rulfo homenaje grace the pages of the re-release of Rulfo's 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, the most recent volume in the Wittliff Gallery Series from the University of Texas Press.

The first time I picked up the UT Press volume, I looked only at the pictures, trying to get a handle for Sacabo's context. The second time I only read text. Then I went through it a third time, allowing myself to experience the power of Rulfo's otherworldly images fastened to those of Sacabo's luminous photographs, and to understand that Rulfo and Sacabo are on these pages narrators for the same ethereal tale. What Rulfo tells in the absence of light, Sacabo tells with luminosity, sometimes but a scant brightness layered in shadow. It is a light nonetheless that will move you.

Sacabo has exhibited in one-woman shows in Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Josephine Sacabo is, as she will tell you, a Laredo homegirl and the former Marialice Martin. "Who I really am I hope is in my photographs," she told me.

LareDOS: Who is Josephine Sacabo, formerly of Laredo? (It's hard not to ask if you are related to the Laredo S'cabos).

Sacabo: Josephine Sacabo is the former Marialice Martin, born and raised in Laredo.

LareDOS: What is the genesis of your name?

Sacabo: We were sitting around a stage in a theatre in New York after a rehearsal of our company and everyone but me had a stage name to help ward off the possible pain of a bad review. I came up with Josephine after a very old lady who was the secretary to the mayor in the town in France where we had our house and who was my very dear friend. But I couldn't come up with a last name so I just got frustrated and said, "Let’s just call me Josephine y se acabo!" My husband liked the sound of it so we modified it to Sacabo. And that was that.

LareDOS: How much of Laredo and the borderlands are in your work? Were you formed by this place? (And the unspoken question, where were you re-formed?)

Sacabo: I was indeed very much formed by Laredo and in particular the Mexican aspects of the culture. I consider myself Mexican spiritually, and speaking Spanish before English has had a tremendous effect on how I formulate my experiences. To the point that there are feelings and aspects of myself that have no English language equivalents I can think of. Also being brought up Catholic has had a big effect -- at times I move toward it and at times against it but never with indifference. I hate the hierarchical aspects of the church but there is little in this world I find more moving than the expressions of simple faith such as retablos, día de los muertos, calaveras, and the parades of Semana Santa in Mexico and Guatemala. In fact the most moving expression of faith I have ever seen was this amazing moment in Antigua Guatemala during Semana Santa. I was doing a series of photos and I was standing in a recess at the entrance to a cathedral where they were displaying a statue of Christ after he was removed from the cross, and an Indian woman knelt beside him and took out her handkerchief and began to wipe his brow and speak soft consoling words to him as she wept. It was as if she were in fact consoling her own son and I stood there transfixed by that act of faith. I did not take a picture but the image remains forever in my mind. The sad part is that the Church so often betrays that faith. Also, family is very important to me, and I am very close to my mother and sisters even though we live such different lives. I did, however, have to move away in order to find myself because Laredo, warm and welcoming as it can be in some ways, is also very conservative and insulated, and there was no context possible in Laredo for me to become the artist I felt I was meant to be. Going to Bard College was one of the most important moves I ever made. It was a very liberal and progressive school, very much veered toward the arts and also very classical in its educational philosophy, so I was introduced to Western Culture and art history and it was like getting good and drunk, and I also found myself surrounded by people like me with the same interests and desires, including my husband, who is a writer and whose values and aspirations I shared. That's where the "reform" started.

LareDOS: Fill in the years that have elapsed since you left Laredo.

Sacabo: After getting married and leaving school we moved first to New York, where neither of us felt at home but it was what you did in those days, and after two years went to Europe for the next 12 years. We started a theatre company in London in the 60s and in France, and ended up buying a tiny house for $1,500 in the south of France in a small village and supported ourselves buying antiques and shipping them back to the U.S. I worked as an actress in our company and others for many years, and once when we were in the south of France I found a camera a friend had left behind and got another friend to show me how to use it and that was that. We returned to the U.S. largely because my husband felt he wanted to be around English again and New Orleans seemed like a good place to try, so we took a freighter over and did a story about it and called ourselves journalists upon landing in N.O. and found work and friends and the French Quarter and stayed. Later, our daughter Iris was born and this became home. She was raised in the Quarter and after going to Bard and living in New York came back with her husband and lives in the next block. We all love it here.

LareDOS: Why Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo? Why the decision to marry your work to the literary images of this one story?

Sacabo: I think my images and Rulfo's story were married before I knew it. I was in fact already working in Guerrero Viejo when my collaborator's aunt told us about Pedro Páramo and said it sounded like what we were doing. So I read it and discovered to my great delight that Susana San Juan was the woman I had been photographing in the ruins. Everything about that character fit the bill. Substitute artist for madwoman and you get the idea. I became convinced that Susana was conceived as an artist in a time and place which gave her no possibility of freedom or expression. It gave me the structure, context, and imaginative possibility that helped me focus the series. I never thought to illustrate the book. Why would I do that? To me it was a psychological portrait of a woman and her world. Bill Wittliff had to convince me it should be done with the novel. I felt intimidated at first simply because I think so much of the book, but as I put the pictures in certain places in the text I had a moment of certainty that they belonged together.

LareDOS: What is it about old, abandoned towns in Mexico (such as Guerrero Viejo) that you want to capture as images? What were some of the other towns in Mexico in which you photographed?

Sacabo: I love the fact that ruins are so often more beautiful than what was there before. Like the combination of man's creations with time and Nature form something beyond what man alone creates. Plus the fact that there's all these memories of people who went before enclosed in the ruins, as Rulfo so brilliantly describes in the book. Almas en pena wandering around is a great photo subject as far as I'm concerned. I also worked in lots of little places in Jalisco and in Pozos near San Miguel de Allende. I also worked in the town where Rulfo was born and drove all through there looking at what he had seen.
LareDOS: Name some of the influences on all your forms of expression -- your own writing, photojournalism, photography.

Sacabo: Photographer: Josef Sudek above all; Painter: Vermeer, Goya, Joseph Cornell, Egon Schiele; Writers: Rilke, Baudelaire, Vincente Huidobro, Rulfo, Elena Poniatowska, Elena Garro, Lorca, Mallarme, Proust, Sor Juana, Pedro Salinas.

LareDOS: Name a writer you read most.

Sacabo: I tend to fall in love with writers and read everything they wrote until someone else comes along. If I had to I'd probably say Rulfo and Baudelaire are the ones I go back to, as well as Lorca. I go back to poetry over and over. In fact I memorize the poems I love so I can have them inside me always.

LareDOS: What is it like to have a writer and journalist of such vast soul, acclaim, and credibility like Elena Poniatowska say of your photographs, ". . . it is clear they are not the work of an illustrator but rather of an illuminata, a widow, a mourner, a tragic heroine, a Texan of ancient Greece."

Sacabo: It's almost impossible to describe what I felt when I got a copy of Elena's essay. It has been the single best moment of my life as an artist. It’s like a talisman I carry folded up in my pocket that protects me against fear and doubt and incomprehension. It gives me courage when I need it and affirmation on a level few artists have the good fortune to receive. How could anyone hope for more than the line you quoted from Elena? I am very very proud of that.

LareDOS: There's a bit of serendipity -- things falling into place -- your being drawn to the ruins of Guerrero Viejo without knowing that it was the home of your grandmother, the propitious meeting of Bill Wittliff at the Houston Foto Fest and the exchange of information that you were working on Pedro Páramo and that was his favorite book. Has your life as an artist always been blessed by such kismet?

Sacabo: My life as an artist has been blessed at times but that's been fairly recent and I have been at it a long, long time. I guess it's been a few lucky meetings and a lot of hard work and hope and doubt in between.

LareDOS: When do you know a photograph has worked for you? It is yourself you first please with your work. Is that correct?

Sacabo: I know a photo is right when I think I'd be really envious if someone else had taken it. It is most definitely myself I have to please, and I'm not easy on myself. Other people are much more generous.

LareDOS: What are your tools -- your camera of choice, your lens of choice, your darkroom technique, the paper you use.

Sacabo: I work in medium format with only natural light and Tri-X film, and I am most definitely not an equipment junky. I spend a lot of time in the darkroom and about one-half to three-quarters of the work is done in the darkroom. I have all kinds of darkroom manipulations that I do to get the image to say what I want. I do all my own printing and am probably shortening my life considerably. I use a paper I order from England because it is no longer available in this country. Each series I do is printed differently. I work at it until I find the right look for the material, but it’s safe to say it is never literal. For instance, the series I'm working on now is toned a deep grey blue because it’s called "Nocturnes" and all takes place supposedly by moonlight.