People Who Mark

I started with the intention of telling the storyteller’s story, but Sofia had other plans.

It was almost as if letters, words and ideas flowed out of that very same persons who so captivates youth and adults.

In the terrace, on that windy Saturday morning, the wind would occasionally play with the blond hair of the granddaughter of Gunther Maul, the first to arrive in Madeira with that surname.

The woman who told me her story – her story – is no longer the different young girl, with chameleon green eyes freckles and very light hair who went to school in Madeira and who was keenly observed by children with dark eyes and brown eyes.

Her grandfather (his father’s father) didn’t like the cold, and started sending cvs to warm places, receiving an answer from New Zealand (in six months time) and another from Madeira (effective immediately).

With a Jewish background, and in the aftermath of world war one, the option was to leave Hamburg as soon as possible.

He quickly became part of the foreign community residing in the island, and was known as Gerry – the term used for Germans during the war. Then, says Sofia with her blue eyes almost closed due to midday glare, he stopped using his native tongue, and didn’t speak of his family. Deliberately.

One day he was at the then Country Club – now Quinta Magnolia – when he saw a young British girl playing tennis. She didn’t talk about her father, but her mother was financially independent, and they used to spend holidays in warm places. As with all love stories, this one also has letters and promises of eternal love. And with the help of her nanny, they wrote for many years. And on the day she turned 21 he went to fetch her, with the money he had saved.

They married four days later, in a London chapel. A disgrace for her mother, for besides being German, he was also poor and without a family. She was disinherited.

Two children were born of this marriage. By this time I am already hooked on the story, and I can feel we are close to the closing. Sofia drinks a bit of tea, as if to turn a page.

On her mother’s side the story is almost as interesting. There was a Californian grandfather, with a Swedish ancestry, who became auctioneer when he went back home. He would ransack barns and trunks, finding antiques which he would then restore and sell.

One day a doctor told him to go somewhere warm for a vacation, and someone told him of a wonderful holiday in Maiorca. He went to the travel agency, and didn’t go past the first syllable. When he got to “Ma…ma…ma”, the travel agent helped him say “Madeira”.

Smiling, the woman with two different earrings stresses: “I only exist due to a geographical error by the travel agent”. He came here, he bought a house here, he brought his family, and eventually a granddaughter got to know Sofia’s father. Her mother, Swedish, married the son of a German, and they now have four Muslim grandchildren. But we’ll get there…

Let’s get back to Sofia. The kid who wanted to be a biologist, and discover more than the Natural History Museum where her grandfather received so many thousands of kids through the years. The years went by, and the story teller, protestant and student in a catholic school, lived her own life, creating her own memories. She and her brother followed their family’s footsteps, and got their own families, with “different” people. As was tradition, after all. She, with a Senegalese, the brother with a Malay. So much so that her father laughs, saying that if one had told him that all his four grandchildren would be muslim he would have laughed. The brother converted in the catacumbs of a London bookshop, and the three kids are cousins of her daughter, and enchanting mix of two races that couldn’t have had better results. Bali is gorgeous, sweet, and very, but very, extrovert, after the first twenty seconds. It isn’t hard to find where her genes come from…

She went to Coimbra to train as an interpreter. The plan was to work for four months per year, and be a marine biologist in the other, and she knew she’d have to complete a degree in both areas. But she had what it takes. She was asked to complete jobs that got her physically sick. “Words left my mouth with which I didn’t agree, while I translated the ideas, and I quit”. Her parents separated, to help all these emotions and, to top it all, she was afraid to fall asleep, because she was part of a Red Cross ambulance and frequently has nightmares about the cases she transported.

She came back to Madeira. She even looked at driving industrial machines, so big was the despair of finding something. She tripped on speech therapy. One more “marriage”, this time between linguistics and the brain, which fascinated her so much that she didn’t hesitate to take the course. The deal with her father was that he would finance the course if she kept her grades above 16. And her stubbornness paid off, because when she finished her degree she started working in a school, with two basic languages: the first was gestural language, and the second was Portuguese, written and spoken. She was the first to do this in Portugal, along with a colleague who is still doing it.

She naturally received plenty of different work propositions, and for a number of years taught in bilingual schools in the Estoril area. She did well. She met the father of her daughter, she got pregnant, and she didn’t look back. Sofia had the habit of telling a story, at the end of her sessions with her students, and one day she was invited to hear stories being told in the Oeiras library. She didn’t hesitate. She was smitten by a course in storytelling, and her life changed. Again. She joined a storytellers’ group that had been created, and that we know as “Contabandistas”.

The group grew. They started promoting storytelling events. She returned to Madeira, permanently, in February 2015, over two years after having told a story as a thank you for the group who went to plant dragon trees in the mountains, after the 2012 fires.

Life became more complicated after she separated in 2014.

She came back to the island, and she held on to the stories as one holds onto a teddy bear, until – she recognizes – everything falls apart. Because one of the most important things in a storyteller is knowing where the audience wants to go.

There’s a specific language – her own and the group’s – that everyone follows. She does not usually see people yawn, or watch the phone, she captivates them with her blue eyes and her relaxed attitude. She only tells stories that move her. It must have to do with freedom. She likes to alternate between traditional tales, life stories and texts with author. She adapts and translates a few things. She makes them better, with her own personal touch, but she always says where the story comes from, and who wrote it. She ends up by embellishing words in the same one way one decorates a Christmas tree, tenderly and very carefully, so that those to whom the story is being told can build their own bridges.

I wanted to know when she realized that that was what she wanted to do, that that was what filled her heart with words that can’t be described. It was with adults. Kids have very lively memories, but they aren’t so demanding. That’s why they are abandoned to their own reading as soon as they learn to read. Sofia explains: “when we enter kindergarten, the teachers tell us stories, but when we get to primary school, our parents think that, just because we learned to read, we can enchant ourselves”. And she adds, in a serious tone: “for years I was unable to hear Brazilian, because I remember my parents watching Gabriela, and we waited – my brother and I –, at the top of the stairs, that the programme would finish so that we could be told the stories we really liked”.

And that why she likes stories of life, that why she keeps coming back to these. We only know where we are going to if we know where we came from. For now, we know only that her smile wanders through the city. If you want to hear a story, sit comfortably and enjoy the blue eyed story teller, the Madeiran who loves the island where she was born due to a geographical error. An error she doesn’t regret.

She signs everything she does with her soul, and questions herself even – after all she is a scientist. On one side she has the inheritance of her father, who’d picture her, alone or with her brothers, as naturally as possible, on the other she has her mother, who’d doll them up on the set dates in which they were to visit the photograph, with a set scenery and flashes shaped like umbrellas.

Sara Reis Gomes is the author of many recent photos of babies and their families that we see in the social networks, but she never imagined, three years ago, that she’d so passionately grab what had been dormant since her childhood.

Marine biologist, married, mother of four, she decided, during a brief spell in a hospital, to organize the pictures of the four, one of them just one year old. She owes to that coup of life the discovery of the passion she has for photography, when in the Nini Design Centre she recalls the first steps of this second coming of the images one puts away.

Sitting by the bar where the tourists of two boats arrive, she looks to the sun through the glass. She is trained as a scientist and has the soul of a mother. The mother who wanted to keep just the best moments – and not all, because one doesn’t need a hundred pictures of a bay’s first year to later remember how he was. After all, her mother just took them to the photographer with one, six and twelve months. But her father was there, to picture her when the dresses weren’t pressed, and the hair tidily combed and tied in ribbons.

But there is something she misses, now that she has started working on Christmas cards ordered by her faithful clients: the simplicity of the accoutrements in the shiny 10x15cm sheets given to grandparents, uncles and godparents.

Today, she stresses, there are so many decorations on the pictures that people get distracted from the main element, the pictured person. And it is against this that she has been fighting in the workshops she develops, and which have been consistently packed. But she is already preparing the ones for next year, one of which to take place at the Nini Design Centre, adding that there will be room for all – “even if I have to create more openings”, she says, smiling.

I look to the mother of four kids, aged between 3 and 14, and I wonder if her day won’t have more hours than all others. Especially when one of them suffers from dyslexia, a disorder that made her start the “Would you mum” blog, that is reinventing itself at this point. She spoke of the student, the son, the child who, instead of reading, would join up the letters, and would thus take longer than the others. And of her decision to take him to Lisbon, looking elsewhere for answers. Including the internet. Her scientist side led her to always question. It took her to study the brain more than many other mothers, and to always explain to her eldest what was going on with him. She didn’t hide the disorder. But she soon found that she was having a monologue, rather than a dialogue. People hid the disorder from their kids. They refused to face it. Sara got very close to neurodevelopment, it became one more resident of the house. They got used to it every day, and the youngest grew up with a brother that required some extra attention. Like all kids do.

She neglected the blog with the same speed in which she picked up photography. She managed to keep them both for some time, but eventually the passion for the “click” and the great moment in which the photo is transformed spoke louder.

Today we speak of the mother who has, since 2002, kept images that her kids will one day see, with no photographer’s poses or combed hairs or ribbons.

She is not afraid to discard the accessory, sticking to what’s important, and has taught just that to many mothers cycling through her workshops, especially enjoying sharing smiles, expressions and emotions that generate smiles. And that why she is so passionate about the children she sees growing through her lenses, the children she attracts to her arms when she wants to capture some of their mischief or chewing on their mother’s chin, in a gentle and unique gesture that she steals into her camera.

It is difficult to remain indifferent to her work. So much so that her style is already recognizable, when someone publishes pictures of a baby’s evolution through its first year, a work that sometimes startrs even before it has wore its first clothes. Yellow or any other colour. Even if the picture, the one everybody talks about, is black and white. It all depends on what one wants to convey. Some pictures are better like this, others require colour to give them life. It is the moment, but above all the emotion that dictate what becomes of the millions of bytes she keeps in her computer and is delivered to the increasing number of clients that seek her services. Like the clients that enter the place where Madeiran designer Nini keeps her creations. These quite a bit heavier than an image, but that also generate a lot of emotions, judging by the tourists that surround us, camera poised and smart phones pointed. I even fear that this will distract my guest, and that she will start giving hints to the amateurs all around us.

Let us go back to time. Of her capacity to organize day to day grind with four children and her work as a biologist. She smiles when she says that after a certain hour, at home, one stops hearing the word mom to start hearing dad. And then, in a softer tone, she seems to confess that her kids’ grades dropped when she started this adventure, but the tone then changes to justify the inevitable: they would eventually have to start studying on their own. She thus delegated responsibilities earlier, even though she counts on the unconditional support of her husband.

I see two women in a single body. Like they are parts of one of those pieces surrounding us designed by Nini. One methodical and inquisitive, always trying to find the whys, by profession, the other one relaxed, that lets her kids scratch and grow with scars, because it’s all a part of growing. If there’s a camera close, good. If not, it doesn’t matter. There will always be another moment. And it’s difficult to fathom where one starts and the other ends, because the relaxed one is a perfectionist, and likes to add technical touches to mini models that aren’t always in the best position for the clothing catalogue.

I thought I should avoid the question, because the answer would be obvious, but it was stronger than me. I wanted to know whether she had taken “the” picture, if that moment, the one that touched her, has already happened. The denial was faster than the shutter of a camera.

She says that what she enjoys is photographing children, landscapes aren’t for her lenses. She likes to picture families, but she doesn’t go as far as those printed in sepia that include a dog on the master’s feet and the patriarch sitting with all others standing around him. The technical explanation for black and white photographs is in the fact that it concentrates on people’s expressions, not on the red skirt or the patterned jacket.

In the post-production she does at home, instinctively, she chooses the result when the photograph survives the triage that discards all the others. She knows whether it will be colours or no colours. And she repeats: “I use instinct a lot”. Even the though the explanation she givesme, later, is by the “other” woman living inside her, that says that “because of my son’s dyslexia I read a lot on neurobiology and I got a better notion of how our brain works. Her biologist side says that visual information is more quickly read than verbal”. And that part, she admits, is more important than photographer techniques. But what’s really good is “when you can get it all”.

Summing up, “the spontaneity of the moment and the clinical eye that discovers what the look of the portrayed person wants to convey is a lot more interesting than a technically perfect picture, without soul, and that leaves us indifferent. And the people who increasingly seek her out, to remember those small moments that only a photographer with emotions can capture, know that.