Your name
Veronica Cruz
Place of birth
Glen Cove, NY
Place where you live now
Glen Cove, NY
3 words to describe you
Resilient, brave, strong
Why do you take pictures?
It became a way for me to take back what I had lost but it is also the safest and healthiest way I can deal with what I have been through. When making Little Earthquakes, and growing/maturing with it, I was learning that I didn’t have to be afraid to dig deeper into my emotions, which were taking place internally, and share the darker parts of my life, which was that I had been raped by my uncle when I was just a kid. Many would probably question why that is something I had decided to share but for me it made me feel like I was now in control of my own life again. As a victim, it took a while for me to come to accept that I wasn’t at fault. I now had somewhere to put this part of my life. I found comfort in knowing that I get to choose how much of my life to share with others. Because as much as this project seems like it tells you all about me, it only shares a small percentage of me and what I have been through.
Where do you get your inspiration?
It comes from what I have been through. I don’t feel like I get to choose what I’ll be making work about until I feel that whatever it is I’ve been holding in, finally starts to overflow and starts becoming a project. It’s what happened when making Little Earthquakes, when I felt like I had lost control of my own emotions and had to find some way of regaining that control, by putting those emotions somewhere safe in order to help myself.
Who are your influences?
Some of my influences for the work I create includes several photographers. One of them being Francesca Woodman and the way she used the space around her as well as lighting. I also looked at JoAnn Chaus’ series Sweetie & Hansom and Conversations with Myself where she uses similar lighting to what I included in my work. With both Woodman and Chaus, I started to study the ways they used light to express what they needed to in their photographs. Seiichi Furuya has been the one photographer I found myself coming back to because he brings us, as the viewer, through the love and grief for his wife who had committed suicide. I wanted to understand his wife Christine as much as I could through his photographs. I wanted to find a moment where she was no longer present. But I was also trying to understand Seiichi as the photographer, photographing her through those moments, not knowing when it would be her last.
What determines the subject matter you choose?
It is a certain feeling I go through that drives me to make the work. With Little Earthquakes, it took four years for it to become what it is now. It is my personal struggles I have been through and continue to go through that determines what I will photograph. I didn’t know what the subject matter would be until the last year of creating it. Little Earthquakes started off with me photographing what I thought I felt mentally and emotionally. I thought the subject matter would have been on mental health but there was a turning point where it took me deeper, making me think I couldn’t get out of it. I felt more anxious and I was losing sleep due to the PTSD that would take over. On top of it, my medical issues started to arise again and all I was doing was talking to several doctors and needing tests and procedures. I had no control over what was happening and I needed distractions to get me out of it all and the only way I knew how to, was to photograph. Slowly I started to see what this project was turning into. I was photographing moments of my PTSD, moments of my childhood, parts of the testing I went through and what I was feeling throughout all of it. Allowing my feelings to guide the photographs is what ended up determining the subject matter for this project, which was me navigating through parts of my traumas.
What impact would you like your art to have?
It became very important to me to not only make work to help myself but to help others. I want my work to be able to make those who have been through what I have, feel seen and less alone. It’s for them to know that they can also continue to survive. What also became very important to me was for my work to impact those who have never experienced what I have been through. I want it to help them understand that this is the reality of some and that these feelings and traumas are deeper than one may think. It is a constant battle that is being fought, even if it did happen in the past. You can’t forget what happened but you can learn how to live life without it hindering you.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
Venice 1985 by Seiichi Furuya
Christine (Seiichi’s wife) is sitting right where the light falls on her, and we know how quickly light changes and moves but in this photograph it feels permanent. She is focused on something that we don’t know but can only assume that perhaps she is looking out the window up at the sky. The light surrounds her just right, even to her feet, and she looks comfortable in this spot. Of course this image feels warm due to the warm tones, her sweater and body language but there is so much more to this image which is why I don’t feel like I’m ever tired of it. This photograph does not feel staged, instead this makes me think we found her in her spot, and she makes us feel as if she is right where she needs to be.
