"This music crept by me upon the waters"

““This music crept by me upon the waters”
and along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street”

— T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

Ohrid was not necessarily a place I should ever have made my way to. I tend to gravitate towards the swirling metropolitan chaos of capital cities when visiting new countries. On this trip, however, it was this lake-side jewel that spurred the whole thing. I saw a picture of St. John the Theologian in the snow – half frosted gingerbread house, half orthodox chapel – and I was sold.

In truth, it shouldn’t have been a surprising destination as Ohrid (Lake, town, environs) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site – the source of my only example of checklist travel. Ecclesiastical Byzantine architecture is among my favorite styles, and it is truly reflected and amplified in the town.

My one great disappointment was that St. Sophia (funny how I kept running into her) was closed, so I missed out on any number of frescos, but all in all had a delightful time exploring the churches.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen as many stray cats as I did there.

It bordered nearly on the ridiculous.

Some posed, some ran… I even bore witness to an impromptu feeding from some local boys, carrying a grocery bag of tiny fried fish.

Never ones to be outdone, the town’s stray dogs seemed to make a point to catch my eye.

At the end of the day, the greatest delight was the lake itself, the bejeweled backdrop to every photo and every vista alike. I’d love to find my way back in the summer to soak up the sun and have more people around for eating and drinking and dancing – all things I found quite excellent in Macedonia, particularly given that it was the crisp frigid early winter.

Havana Ooh Na Na

On a bit of a whim, I decided to participate in 2019’s first Roll Film Week, which you can learn more about here or explore on Instagram here. The quick rundown: RFW is a semiannual event that’s all about sharing photos made on—you guessed it—roll film, i.e. 120 and 135 film.

I still shoot film for so many reasons – primarily, as a way to cheat due to the fact that I simply like the look of film – but I am even worse about analyzing my analog work than my digital. The same can be said for roll film vs. instant film. And I even shoot reversal more than negative (meaning no need to scan to see what’s what, really)… and cut down entirely on monochromatic negative when I left my ersatz darkroom in California a good 5-6 years ago. There’s no excuse, but scanning is tedious, and I’m fairly certain I lost my loupe or left it with the darkroom gear.

I tumbled into analog photography fairly early in my journey and delighted in the weird and wonderful: light leaks, toy cameras, sprocket holes, cross-processing, I wanted it all. Somewhere along the way as my aesthetic matured it seemed logical to mirror my digital process, and Canon 35mm SLRs were a near like-for-like translation. I started with an inherited Rebel S, graduated to the EOS-1N (which came with to Cuba), and now typically use an EOS-1V. It’s nice to have the option to pivot to a digital back while maintaining a shared set of lenses.

Since switching to the Leica Q in November, I haven’t brought a 35mm on travels and am not certain what might make the most sense. Perhaps my old workhorse Yashica Electro 35? (Rangefinder for rangefinder?) At the same time, I adore the 1V in ways I’ve never loved my DSLR, but half of the switch to the Q was prompted by a desire to travel with less bulk altogether. It will be a bit of an experimental process, I imagine.

On the topic of Havana. I can’t remember any place I’ve wanted to visit as much and for as long as I wanted to visit Cuba, and it was glorious beyond my expectations. The people were so lovely and so interesting to talk to (President Obama was at the time moving toward normalizing relations, which made for fascinating conversation.), and so forgiving of my broken, sometimes-bordering-on-accented-Italian Spanish.

Cuba was also a revelation in as much as I had passing privilege, oddly enough. There are only two places in the world I’ve yet been where I’m not instantly physically other: Hawaiʻi (which is absurdly obvious, given that my family is from there) and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Even my name could be mistaken for either (and I do go by Micaela in PR to make things easier). Of course, it’s all for naught the second I open my mouth to speak, but one can try.

One cannot rightly discuss Cuba without mention of the ever-present specters of Che and Fidel (at that time in his twilight). Castro, as so many “Marxists” have in truth, incited middle-class-led revolution and presided over a regime built on fear and suspicion with an iron grip. There are many positive outcomes of his rule (take the Cuban medical practice, for one), but the same can be said of any dictator. The hero worship by certain segments of left-leaning, middle-class, white Americans (albeit primarily in Che t-shirt activism format) I find repugnant, and this as a nearly life-long socialist. I say this not to overly politicize a highly non-political trip, but because it is an indelible imprint on the fabric of the country and these quaint, idyllic, Buena Vista Social Club fairytale notions of Cuba are highly sanitized, somewhat patronizing, and belie a natural depth of human existence. The narrative is too pat.

What I’ve found everywhere I’ve been is that some degree of “people are people” is true: sometimes it’s the good in people, the ability to make connections despite widely disparate realities, but sometimes it’s the ugliness in humanity which is equally true, if impossible to romanticize. We’re all just trying to make it out there at the end of the day, and to that we all deserve the same chances to enjoy health, happiness, and togetherness.

And with that, I’ll step away from my soapbox and get back to the photos.

All photos made with a Canon EOS-1N on Fujichrome Provia 100F or Velvia 100.