Maria by Claudia Ruiz Gustafson

Maria is a conversation with the past, an intimate and personal revelation of connection and loss between where we come from and where we are.

After completing the first part of Historias fragmentadas, I noticed there was one important person missing in the photo collages; a live-in maid my parents hired when we moved to the suburbs of Lima when I was 7. She doesn’t appear in any family portrait and sadly, we didn’t know her last name or her birthday, since domestic help in Peru is usually hired without written contracts, so attempts to locate her were futile. Her name was Maria, and she had eventually left us to start a family of her own. It was a sad departure for me because Maria had been my confidante, my friend, and my teacher, during a vulnerable time in my life. She sang to me in Qhechua, the beautiful language of the Andes; grew chamomile flowers for my anxiety; and taught me simple games when I was lonely.

Maria is the inspiration for the third and last chapter of Historias fragmentadas, a photographic exercise of memory and imagination.

I created this series in my family home in Lima, Peru, within the same walls, on the same floors, and in the same light that entered the same windows that Maria experienced. Furniture and ornaments that she touched have remained unchanged over the years. I also traveled to Maria’s town of Villa El Salvador, an urban, largely residential coastal district on the outskirts of Lima to photograph the streets where she might have walked. For this project, I worked with a woman with long dark hair to represent Maria, and for weeks we collaborated in the house where my parents still live today to honor an important woman in my life and the unconditional love I was given.

Claudia Luiz Gustafson lives and works in Framingham, Massachusetts.
To view more of Claudia’s work, please visit her website.