Guest Alchemist: Sara Melzer
Photographs that transform ordinary into extraordinary
The Alchemists Clubhouse is a weekly newsletter of art, poetry, and coaching tips, plus special member features like this one! Full members are invited to live workshops on Zoom and have access to the full archive of recordings.
Meet Guest Alchemist, Sara Melzer
Sara and I met over ten years ago when I was working through my MFA in Dance at UCLA. At the time, she was a professor in a different department, but we shared a love of tango! In fact, we still do. Here she is enjoying a recent tango event:
And, Sara has a brand new passion that I asked her to share with us this month: photography! I really love how writes about this new alchemical adventure:
In my new photographic journey, I expand my ways of seeing to find value and “picture-worthiness” in simple, mundane objects from everyday life. My camera and I look for tiny, quiet miracles around us that do not clamor for attention. But we zoom in on them with our full attention. In so doing, we transform what seems like a ‘nothing’ into a ‘something’ that feels fulfilling.
When I took up photography a few years ago, my goal was not to make “art” but to see more clearly how my mind works.
So why a camera? Because I imagine my awareness as a camera “eye” that makes more visible what my attention does more invisibly and quickly – so quickly I often don’t notice it. My camera gives me many choices of what to put inside its viewfinder. The kind of focus I select shapes my experience more than the object itself. My camera/mind’s choices illuminate the vast, transformative power of my attention to give meaning and value to my everyday life. That certainly is “art” – the art of life!
Enjoy this collection of “quiet miracles!”
1. & 2. These first two images feature ordinary forks. I had placed them on my backyard glass table for dinner. But when I saw how they looked in the light, yielding interesting shadows and reflections, I was surprised by their unexpected geometrical shapes.
3. Shot on the same table as my forks, this image of a red vase also uses light and shadows to create a geometrical interplay with two other mundane objects, a salad bowl in the background and beneath it, reflections from my glass table.
4. I framed two different ordinary leaves from my garden so that they overlap. The light enables us to see the shadow of one through the other, again creating different geometric patterns.
5. This is a chain-link fence we’ve all seen millions of times before. But here I zoomed in on a broken segment in which the wires form unusual shapes. They made me think of dancing figures.
6. This image has similar “dancer-ly” shapes that mirror the fence wires, focusing on a pair of withered plant stems. Although their flowers are long gone, they still have a surprising grace of their own, as they bask in the glow of the sun overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I call them “curlicue dancers.”
7. This image highlights another plant form we might dismiss as “garbage,” – a dead palm tree frond. But here its reflections in a pond have an ethereal fluidity.
8. I spotlight the fluid movements of two runners on the beach, by using a slow shutter speed
Photography © Sara Melzer
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Walking down Main Street in Santa Monica after reading your easy and seeing your lovely images, I found myself looking—really looking!—at a building I’d never really noticed and admiring its sleek Moderne lines. Turned out to be an historic building—2525 Main St. I’d walked past it, shopped in it, so many times but your essay enabled me to “see” it for the first time! Thank you Sara!
Love your photos, especially the forks and shadow leaves and "dancing" chain link fence. Plus your narrative gives beautiful insight into your goals and process.