Portfolios > Love Letters to Life

Dear Nina,

There are only three things I remember from my first visit to Guernsey in 1969 as a Boy Seaman aboard the Royal Navy Second World War-era frigate, HMS Ulster: sleeping in a hammock in a crowded berth; when the ship’s guns fired, all the lightbulbs fell out; and not being allowed ashore when we anchored off Saint Peter Port. The latter was the most frustrating.

It's been fifty-six years, and I’m back in Saint Peter Port, this time on my own terms. I’m here to visit Victor Hugo’s home in Guernsey, Hauteville House. It’s the third place he lived during his exile from France, and where he finished writing Les Misérables. My introduction to Victor Hugo was listening to Les Misérables on cassette tape while driving from Denver, Colorado, to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1983.

I remember countless lonely drives while struggling with my fragile emotional state. It took twelve more years before I finally faced the source of my trauma, and ten years until I met you, Nina, after discovering your photographs in that now-abandoned antiques mall in Denver. During my Victor Hugo Road trip to North Carolina, I recall pulling over several times because my eyes were filled with tears. Hugo’s humanity profoundly impacts me.

I have reread Les Misérables many times during dark, transitional periods on my journey to where I am now, staging my own death in Victor Hugo’s Garden. I’m unsure what it means to photograph oneself as dead while still alive. It has a long tradition in the history of photography. Maybe I want to be part of that. Or perhaps it’s a feeble attempt at understanding my relationship with the Universe. Or maybe I just want to see what I look like dead. But contemplating death makes me want to live. So, there’s that, Nina. See you and Victor soon enough.

Love, Roddy