What does it feel like when you are in fourth grade
and your mom gets cancer?
It feels like that day I brought my Snoopy
lunchbox to school, the yellow plastic one
that snapped closed with a click,
got left on the playground, forgotten.
The next morning that playground was covered
with shards of yellow plastic.
What else can you do but bring your lunch in brown paper bags
for the rest of the year
for the rest of every school year to come
and pretend you like it that way.
I imagine when she
shot the raccoon
as it drank the tepid
mid-day rain
from my brothers’
kindergarten-colored,
water-dotted
plastic play set,
she used the sun’s
ray as a scope,
the weight of
my pudgy infant brother
pulling tight like a sling
on her arm, another son
clinging to her calves,
clamping her to the earth
with the steadying force
of ten toddler fingers
as she slid open
the screen door, pointed
the barrel at the backyard menace
and pulled the trigger
just once,
without ceremony
without raising her
blood pressure,
heart rate, eyebrow-simply
disappearing the problem
as if she was smoothing
the wrinkles of a sheet.
—Shannon Curtin, from Motherland
Anchor & Plume Press. Used by permission of the poet.
At fifteen, I drew stick figures
of my parents and me,
without flesh or feature,
quick, sexless.
Dissatisfied, I turned my pencil aslant
adding a tipped smile,
breasts and fingernails.
Knowing the tricks of the graphite then
I saw how easy it was to cause
and not analyze.
I could add apples to a tree’s branches
whether it had foliage or not,
and a peach tree could bear plums.
My drawings of my children are dimpled.
They shine like glazed paper.
This one of my son seems overpopulated,
so I will erase the brain that bedevils him
with pleated thoughts shuffling
like poker cards.
If I rub the eraser across my daughter’s heart
she’ll make her way like a straight-eyed
comet, leaving a wake of hunger.
KELLĒ SAUER is a photographic artist who has a very special vision and poetic touch.
If you are looking for a special anniversary, birthday, or Valentine’s gift for your guy, or a chance to create beautiful keepsakes for your children, KELLĒ might just be your photographer of choice. (Yes, she will travel for you.)
KELLĒ is also available for weddings, to capture the heart of the experience in images so beautiful they’ll take your breath away.
I hope you enjoy this interview, that shares her heart and thoughtfulness—and I hope you find inspiration in it for your own life.
click to see photo larger
L.L.:
I’ve had the pleasure and the privilege of being there almost from the beginning—at least online—of your photography journey. I’ve watched you grow and explore and, always, do beautiful work, even as your style has changed. In my deepest heart, I hope that someday your latest work will grace the walls of a museum, or ten!
Speaking of beginnings, I’d like to hear about yours a little. Who gave you your first camera—or did you purchase it yourself? Were you just exploring, or did you dream forward even at the start? I mean, wow, did you ever think you’d take your camera to Italy and do a shoot like the one featured in this interview?
KELLĒ:
I wouldn’t be who I am without you, Laura, and my photography certainly wouldn’t be where it is if you hadn’t been there for my online beginnings.
My photography beginnings came before I ever held a camera. My earliest memories come to me in pictures: lamplight, sunsets, starlight overhead on a wheelbarrow ride, rainbow plastic balloons on my bedside lamp, the slit incandescent lamplight on my floor after I’d been tucked in at night, moonlight on snow lighting a ballerina-wallpapered bedroom. I think I was making pictures before I knew my words, but I didn’t know how to speak my “native tongue” until I was about twelve years old, when my dad gifted me a little blue 35mm camera for Christmas. My first photo captured a frost that iced the fence he’d built around our Illinois farmhouse to keep my mother’s goats in.
Because money was tight in our family of ten and film was an unnecessary expense, I wasn’t to gain an opportunity to develop my work until college, when I was able to secure funds for a “real camera,” a Single Lens Reflex camera that had an automatic mode that let me point and shoot the thing with a nice lens. I began photographing my friends. The light. The campus. Anything around me that caught my eye. And then I would develop the photos and ask anyone and everyone if they were any good.
My goals in college were small, and largely successful. Some of my images are still featured in the college’s print and marketing media. I never dreamed then that I would one day be photographing weddings or traveling around the world with my camera.
click to see photo larger
L.L.:
When I first knew you, your photography was all about light. It was your signature. Yet, over time, I remember asking you if you’d consider working a bit more with darker hues. And now, to my great surprise and delight, you are. How is light still a part of your work? What has led you to do almost chiaroscuro work, in a painterly style?
KELLĒ:
I think light is still my signature. And I don’t shoot dark for the sake of shooting dark, like many photographers dabbling in chiaroscuro. As I have developed as an artist and as a human with intense periods of depression, my eye and my heart have been drawn almost metaphorically to the light entering into the darkness, to the warmth and safety of the rose-gold in the gray, but it wasn’t until the last six months or so that I (as a fully self-taught photographer) finally figured out that 1) all of my favorite photos from anyone had this quality of light within the darkness, and 2) I could actually leave behind an aesthetic I didn’t prefer anymore and try one that I did.
L.L.:
Your work is deeply poetic. Like the best poems, which contain vision and focus, your work speaks past thought and straight to the heart. How has poetry been a part of your photography journey, if at all?
KELLĒ:
I love to write and to speak and to converse, but sometimes I think my pictures may simply be the shorthand for my poetry, an easier way of communicating the feelings I am always trying to express. I often use my own images as placeholders for words I will write later, perhaps in another season, when I am able to articulate something more thoroughly.
T.S. Poetry author Maureen Doallas has called me a “poet-photographer,” and it’s a moniker that has stuck with me. My photos flow from my words and my words flow from my photos. As I mentioned above, it is a language, one worth a thousand words, and one worth a thousand pictures. I live in between. My photography clients tell me that sessions with me are like therapy sessions, because as I shoot, I speak to them the beauty that I am seeing in them, in the world around us, in the way they are, and the way they are with me.
Poetry taught me that not everything has to make sense. Just as a poem sometimes speaks in phrases that communicate an overall feeling at the end of it, a perfectly composed picture may not be as powerful as a photo that lets the light and the dark sway and flow and communicate with one another throughout the frame. Poetry allowed me to be an artist with my camera, where photography classes about technology and composition would simply have drained the life from me.
click to see photo larger
L.L.:
You’re a mom, several times over. Do you believe you’d be the photographer you are had you not had children? How does having kids currently affect your work, whether thematically or just in terms of actually getting the work done?
KELLĒ:
No. Being a mother pushed me through doors I never would have opened if I had never had children. I have a pragmatic streak that would have kept me working in an office for financial security for the rest of my born days.
After my oldest daughter was born, I experienced two years of postpartum depression that left me physically unable to register the sunlight. I realized when she was about three months old that I could still see it in my pictures of her, so I shot and I shot and I shot and I shot, because not only could I not remember the sunlight, I couldn’t remember the days. I couldn’t remember my baby. But when I looked at the world through my lens, and again in my computer as I processed, the darkness often moved away. I found I could remember life that happened if I could remember what photo I took on that day.
Now, my children simply push me out of my natural introversion every single day. I am almost never alone, even when I am depressed, and as I watch their lives expand, I am learning to expand my own, to open my heart further, to reach out with kindness to others with whom I would like to work. I believe that my own growth as a person and as an artist will challenge them to reach higher themselves as they grow older. My work in photography has also given them a picture of womanhood that I did not receive from a mother whose gift was in nurture and homemaking.
It is always a challenge to get my work done. I am careful to set my clients’ expectations around my actual timelines with school runs and sick days. The hardest parts for me are balancing my emotional energy between my art and my children, especially as they have grown older and asked me for more. “Done” is often a moving target, but it’s also a beautiful challenge to train my own free spirit to learn the beauty of the ritual we all need.
click to see photo larger
L.L.:
Do you have a favorite poet? How about a favorite poem? I’d love to hear. Along these lines, have you ever thought of doing “poem shoots” sort of the way you seem to be doing “painter shoots” (I love how some of your work is channeling Vermeer these days!)?
KELLĒ:
That is not an easy question to answer. Mary Oliver is probably my favorite poet, followed closely by Christina Rosetti. Both poets speak profoundly of loss and of finding life within their loss, themes that resonate deeply with my own language of feeling. Another favorite is David Whyte, whose prose in his book, Consolations, has been a bit of a lifeline this last year as I have been deepening further after a cross-country move that broke my heart and turned my world upside down. My current favorite poem is one of his, a poem called “Stone.”
Stone (Thobar Phádraig)
by David Whyte
The face in the stone is a mirror looking into you.
You have gazed into the moving waters,
you have seen the slow light, in the sky
above Lough Inagh, beneath you, streams have flowed,
and rivers of earth have moved beneath your feet,
but you have never looked into the immovability
of stone like this, the way it holds you, gives you
not a way forward but a doorway in, staunches
your need to leave, becomes faithful by going nowhere,
something that wants you to stay here and look back,
be weathered by what comes to you, like the way you too
have travelled from so far away to be here, once reluctant
and now as solid and as here and as willing
to be touched as everything you have found.
I have been staring at this poem for a year, slowly memorizing it with my entire being, feeling my life flashing before my eyes as I face an immovable God and reality that does not change to suit my whims. I feel I am just beginning to understand the strength I have gained through my losses and the intense changes I have experienced over extended periods of grief and depression. The invitation in David’s words to embrace the things I cannot change, and to be willing to let reality break against me has offered me a new perspective on loss and on showing up for my life and the beauty to be found – both in my daily life and within myself – even if I can’t dictate my reality.
And you’d better believe I have been thinking of shoots built around poems. This is actually one of my soft personal photography prompts for 2019. I have this little book by L.L. Barkat about love that I want to linger on.
L.L.:
Aw, thanks. 🙂 As an artist and a mom, is there anything else you’d really like to share with our Moms on Poetry readers? Some kind of encouragement or advice, a story or an observation, or even a favorite quote? Or something else altogether?
KELLĒ:
As mothers, I think we always have this idea of how we should be, how we should mother, how we should sacrifice, how our kids should turn out, how we should be feeling about anything and everything. But beginning both my motherhood and my artist journey at the same time through a haze of intense depression gave me a different perspective.
Because of my physical limitations, I didn’t have the luxury of “doing it all” after my first baby was born. I could only do things that I had energy to do, and for me that meant choosing my happy places. Creating meals. Playing with colors and design. Sitting in the light. Taking pictures. I learned what my gifts were instead of my responsibilities. I learned my own language even as my children learned theirs.
As I emerged from the fog of those first depressed years with a new lifestyle I hadn’t quite meant to create, I realized that where my mother’s gift and example to me had been nurture, my own gift is and example to my children is seeing people. The more I develop that gift, the more I am able to see my children and to provide in my own way for them both physically and emotionally.
We weren’t all made to be the same mother or to produce children who would be the same as other children. I am the mother my children were meant to have, and they expect me to be me, not some idea of a mother that they need. Living into my gifts has been the best gift I could have given them, and my favorite vision for our future is bringing them into it all with me as they develop their own gifts.
L.L.:
Thanks so much, Kellē. I’m deeply appreciative that I’ve had the chance to follow your work for so long. And I look forward watching where your art continues to take you—and, well, where you continue to take it. ☺
I see you like space
between my car and the raised
bumper of an F150 sitting
wider than yellow parking lines.
I know when to brake and back
up, when to cut the wheel
so I turn just far enough
into your space, filling it
with so much of myself that
almost I fill it all, almost
I feel the crunch of fender and truck.
My power saves
paint jobs at a price.
Every hero has her heal.
Mine’s the depth I can’t stop
sensing, a constant knowledge
of our world packed tight,
nearing collision, and the fear
of someone cutting too sharp,
closing the space completely.
At night I know twin lights
of speeding cars enough
to pull out and see we’re safe
in our sufficient depth of space.
To be a pilgrim is to ring the stones
with the clean music of your best black heels,
each click a lucky strike that sparks a fire
to see by, that lights up the long and level road
you walk with no map, no stick, no wheels
to relieve you when your feet ache and tire.
To be a pilgrim own what you own,
stuff it in your clutch, lug it in your tote,
all the heavy history you’d like to lose
nestled up against your dead mother’s shoes.
To be a pilgrim you must be a killer
of myth, a new invention of desire.
Every pilgrim is a truth-teller.
Every pilgrim is a liar.
—Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, from Still Pilgrim, Paraclete Press, used by permission of the poet
