By Maureen Langloss

All photos by South 85 Artist-in-Residence Maureen Langloss

See Maureen’s photo portfolio here.

For me, photography is writing. I don’t look at it as independent from the other artistic spaces I occupy. Whether it is an image or a line of poetry or an entire novel, all connect to this overarching drive to witness and describe and find meaning. To tell a story. Using a lens, of course, leans more deeply into the witnessing component. Carrying a lens makes me more open to the world, to noticing, to wonder.

A few weeks ago, from inside a taxi, I saw a woman stop in front of one of those green plywood walls erected to enclose construction sites. These walls are all over New York City, where I live. The woman faced the wall, ran the tip of her finger down it, then examined her finger. Why? When she put that finger to her tongue, I gasped, fumbling to get my camera ready. I missed the shot; the taxi rolled past too quickly. But the act of noticing, raising the camera, the feeling of the image evaporating, left a mark in my artist brain. The process is as important as the product. I like when a photograph requires lowering down onto the ground, getting dirt on my hands or snow on my face, when it is a physical act like wiping a finger down a wall and tasting it. I am still wondering about this woman, about what drove her to want to taste this wall. It was perhaps the same powerful human curiosity that drove me to want to photograph her, to understand something.

I am always looking for what might fit inside or outside the frame, how long the line should be, how wide the frame, where the light is inside or adjacent to the frame or the line, what the frame might obscure, what the frame or page loses in the fight against time. I am always looking for things that are funny or don’t make sense or shouldn’t go together. Interesting juxtapositions and contrasts and whimsy. I like when a frame contains a variety of textures, when there are layers of meaning. Stone and sky, glass and vinyl, human skin and plastic cup, all in one shot or story. I love when something conventionally ugly is beside something conventionally beautiful. This is why I take lots of pictures of trash. Trash is my aesthetic.

The theme of country and city for South 85 Journal’s new issue delighted me, because I’m always looking for elements of city in country and country in city. I often take photographs that appear deep in the woods, but were actually shot in New York City. In the country, I photograph a rusted pipe or a fire hydrant ensconced in vegetation or a random piece of furniture left behind in a field. Proof of human existence, of its tendency to destroy and break and build.

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South 85 artist-in-residence Maureen Langloss is a lawyer-turned-writer living in New York City. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Split Lip Magazine; her photography has appeared in Orion; and her writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best Small Fictions, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. Her work has been named a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories, received the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Find her online at maureenlangloss.com or on social media @maureenlangloss