"I obtained the photographic images by stirring water around in a tiny bowl and photographing the interaction between sunlight and the moving water. These photographic images are primarily abstract with uncannily evocative figurative elements. The images are not manipulated. They result from the camera’s freezing of patterns in the water swirling too quickly for the naked eye to capture. In this sense, 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 acts of interpretive perception on the part of viewers."
María DeGuzmán is a conceptual photographer, writer, scholar, and music composer. She has published photography in The Grief Diaries, Coffin Bell, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and Map Literary; poetry in The Kentucky Poetry Review, The Cape Rock, and Empty Mirror; short stories in Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, and Sinister Wisdom; and has a photo-text creative non-fiction piece in Oyster River Pages. She has also published three scholarly books: Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (Indiana University Press, 2012); and Understanding John Rechy (University of South Carolina Press, 2019).