Visions of life charred by firestorm
When firefighters gave photographer Norma I. Quintana five minutes to get out of her Napa Valley home last fall as the Wine Country fires raged through the region, she didn’t try to grab any of her 250 cameras or her gelatin silver prints or darkroom equipment. She’d been through fire scares before and was always back to normal the next day.
But this time, she didn’t make it back for three days, and by then what was left of her art studio/camera museum she could hold in the palm of her hand.
So that is what she did. Using a black plastic glove as a canvas, Quintana took iPhone pictures of the charred body of her Leica, her Rolleiflex, her Hasselblad and her first Nikon. Then she moved on to her jewels, figurines and any other mementos that were recognizable.
These digital photos form “Forage From Fire: Images by Norma I. Quintana,” which opens with a public reception Thursday, Oct. 4, at San Francisco Camerawork.
More than 75 framed pictures, all with the same blackglove treatment, line the walls.
“I was overwhelmed by my need to document the wreckage and record the remnants of my life,” recalls Quintana, 64, while taking a break last week from the hanging process. “I photographed them as if they were specimens.”
One year removed from the Atlas Peak wildfire, Quintana gets only slightly emotional in talking about the events of Oct. 8-10, 2017. But she was not as emotional as she expected even then, when she saw the ashes of her life for the first time. Seeing the world through a photographer’s eye helped, she says.
“It sounds twisted, but there was this strange beauty to it,” she says. “I only work with available light, and the smoke in the air created an unexpected mood.”
Quintana, who photographs in the tradition of social documentary, shoots only in film and only black-and-white. She figured her digital images in color were good therapy and maybe worth posting to Instagram, and that was about it.
But she had been in the group show “Circus” at Camerawork and had just picked up her images a month before the fire. Camerawork Executive Director Heather Snider offered help.
“I’d lost everything in a fire myself, in the Mission, in 1994,” Snider says, “so I know what it is like.”
Quintana declined the material offer. She is married to Napa cardiologist Dr. Sergio Manubens, and they have found a small house in Napa while waiting to rebuild their home of 29 years.
As people continued to reach out through social media, Quintana would post images of the little things she’d saved, not the big things she’d lost.
“You could see the body of work growing,” Snider says, “and after about six months, I reached out again and asked if there was enough work to do a show for the anniversary of the fire.”
In addition to 100 prints, Quintana brought along a box full of charred camera bodies for display. She is also a collector of manual typewriters, and a 1940s Royal is at the show’s entrance at the top of the stairs, beside its photograph. Tap on the keys, and tufts of ash flake off.
“As I held these objects in my hand, I had a feeling of rediscovering my life,” she says.