For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an intimate relationship with light: the way it filtered through my bedroom window as a child, the auburn twilight of an Indian Summer, its ability to saturate feelings, illuminate moments and crystallize time.
I was 8 the first time I looked through a camera. It was my father’s old 35 mm Minolta. We were in Montana, in an apple orchard at dusk. I still remember the feeling of excitement that rippled through me as I peered through the camera’s foggy lens, with its blinking orange light meter: The world within a window, that ghostly apple orchard, framed within a single square.
Like most people passionate about photography, I was swept away by a desire to collect time. Looking back, it was almost like a fever. I wanted to archive every moment, capture every aberration of light. The feeling was rapturous. Snippets of life, frozen in time.
With my father’s clunky 1970s Minolta dangling off my shoulder, I spent my teenage years wandering through city parks, loitering about cafes and climbing onto rooftops, feverish with a desire to capture the world around me, to write a story with light. I absolutely relished the experience.
After graduating from Mercer Island High School in 1999, I enrolled at the University of Washington. I applied for a bachelor’s of art in photography. After two quarters of prerequisite drawing and painting classes, I grew impatient. “The whole reason I take pictures is because I can’t draw,” I would protest to my mother, who only encouraged me to “be patient.” But I had no patience for patience when it came to photography.
By spring, I had dropped all my art classes. I changed my major to journalism and Baltic studies and signed up for evening photography workshops at a local community college. Who needed a diploma to be a photographer, I reasoned. And I was right.
In July of 2001, I departed for Riga on a six-month study abroad program. I had fallen in love with Latvia eight years before when I spent the summer of 1993 “re-connecting with family and roots” as my father put it (like hundreds of other Latvian expats at the time), and promised myself that I would go back. What I didn’t realize at the time was that my desire to return would grow into a longing to stay.
During my six-month study in Riga, I fell into a sort of trance with the city, or perhaps it was with the Northern Baltic light. How does one put into words the radiance of Purvciems at dusk? The neon glow of Chaka Street? The pink of a mid-summer’s night?
When the day came to fly back to Seattle, I almost felt sick. I was entranced with Riga, and more so with the Soviet-block suburbs where I spent my weekends. Even today, I find immense comfort walking within that labyrinth of concrete: the echo of children and rustle of birch trees, the faint and bittersweet smell of cabbage, stout old babushkas and coy teenage girls, the endless checkerboard of lit windows — warmth within a sea of grey.
In the end, I got on that plane to America, determined to finish school and return to Latvia as soon as I could. The idea consumed me. For weeks, months, I lived like a mole in the university’s darkroom, developing roll after roll of film. My eyes devoured the photographs I had taken of Riga, each image a reminder of how badly I longed to go back.
I was eventually invited by a local museum — the Nordic Heritage Museum — to display my photographs. The exhibition was called “The New Face of Latvia.” My work was later shown at the University of Washington and then at the Seattle Latvian Center.
I won a national photography contest for one of the images - a picture of a Kursi boy and his dog, their silhouettes frozen beneath the filtered light of an oak tree. I used the prize money to fly back to Riga in September 2003, seven days after I graduated. My tentative plan was to stay in Latvia for three months. Three months turned into three years. I got a job as a reporter at The Baltic Times, a pan-Baltic English newspaper. While my weekdays were devoted to reporting, my weekends were saved for photography. Those early Saturday mornings and late Sunday evenings, spent wandering the Riga suburbs with my camera, are what I lived for.
Contact Elizabeth Celms at ecelms@gmail.com.
