remembering brodsky.

Photographs by Ewa Zebrowski. Text by Ewa Monika Zebrowski and Mark Strand.

Ewa Monika Zebrowski, Montreal, 2004. 25 signed inkjet prints, 8½x8½".

Joseph Brodsky was a Nobel Prize winning poet and author. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972. He taught at Mount Holyoke and Columbia University for 15 years while living in the United States. On two occasions he was nominated as the American poet laureate. Recently, a friend lent me Watermark, a collection of 48 short essays about Venice written in 1992. Whenever he had the opportunity (more than 30 trips), Brodsky went to Venice. Its mystery appealed to his sensibilities, inspired him to reflect and write about the transient nature of the human condition. He always came to Venice in winter. He found the cold heightened his senses in this city of water, seaweed, barges, and labyrinth-like passages. This city of melancholy seduced him. Watermark is a poetic work. As the title implies, water is a leitmotiv. Brodsky writes about reflections, mirrors, dust, chandeliers, identity and anonymity. He weaves an account of his time and thoughts in this unique city, wandering the narrow streets, lost in his own solitude. Brodsky’s writing transports me to further explore and expand my own reflections on memory and personal history that have been at the core of my work. In his work I discover my own themes and preoccupations. In response to his writing, I want to create a body of photographic images that express my own feelings on time passing and memory. I want to translate Brodsky’s universe into a visual narrative that reflects his interior world. "People age and die, things disappear: eventually everything survives only through memory." The Essential Duane Michals, Marco Livingstone Ewa M. Zebrowski July 2003

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