Keeping Old Promises
Smooth Operator by Brenda Zuniga, SOC
On the set of GORDON RAMSAY: UNCHARTED, on location in Puerto Rico. Photo by Gary Humphrey
Years ago I started writing a magical realism novel about my grandmother’s life growing up as a Pipil (descendant of the Aztecs) in El Salvador, surviving massacres and civil war, and eventually raising a beautiful family and living to be a tiny old lady. In my version of telling her story she was an orphan that traveled around the world, learning lessons from strangers along the way, to eventually become the warrior she was always meant to be. I still haven’t finished the novel but, somehow, I ended up adopting my grandmother’s fictional lessons as my own.
SCHOOL DAYS I picked up my first video camera during my last year of art school, for a video installation project about my love affair with Havana, Cuba.
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I was in the discovering-my-roots phase of young adulthood, all passion and politics, spending hours in the darkroom printing giant photographs, trying to find my voice in my expanding view of the world. The search for identity sneaks up on you as an artist. It was upon graduation, that delicate moment where you are unleashed into the world, that I took a trip with my parents to my father’s home in Nicaragua. It was his first time back in 24 years and I was documenting every second of it. Halfway through the trip we were hit head-on by a drunk driver and, cameras seat-belted alongside me, I filmed the whole thing. It was terrible. We were all pretty badly hurt and for 2.5 seconds I thought I had lost them both. Throughout the course of the documentary my dad’s idea of home changed—Los
SOCIETY OF CAMERA OPERATORS · SOC.ORG