Click on the images above to enlarge September 2002 In her most recent collection Inner Light, Mexican photographer Flor Garduno has evolved form the realm of documentation (present in her previous book Witness of Times) to that of meditation. In the process, she has pared down her art to essentials: her studio is sometimes the outdoors but more frequently a small adobe shed near her home; she uses only natural light; her models are mostly friends; and the objects in her still lifes are familiar: crows and doves, flowers, leaves, a few clay vessels, an animal-shaped bench. Here is an open book. The wind has leafed through the pages, they must have become sails - and the volume, freed from gravity, floats on the pond along with giant water-lilies. A simple pockmarked bone, an object found by Garduno's daughter Azul - posed on a small pedestal, acquires the weight of a Henry Moore sculpture with a curved back and hunched shoulders. A woman lies in fetal position, holding her breasts. Her body covered in ink, she appears as if the night's darkness had rubbed off on every part of her but her glowing face. In Garduno's world human, organic and animal easily merge and exchange their qualities. A pair of giant, veined leaves may become wings or a dais; a hand and a calla lily are both flowers with the open corollas of fingers and petals. A girl's body is speckled with spots like the skin of an ocelot - or a pear. In turn a pear or pomegrenate show deep, open slits like wounds or a woman's sex, and a peacock's tail becomes a woman's hair, flowing over her hips, down her calves. Pregnant women, tenderly cupping their curves, seem like ripe fruit, and the walls of the adobe hut acquire a life of their own. Our sense of scale is lost: a leaf, a bird's head, a sword, could become gigantic, shielding a body, while a grown woman's entire body could be no larger than a flower. Shadows weigh as much as bodies. Garduno's world is at once child-like and deeply sexual, spare and sophisticated, realistic and magical. Her best photographs evoke a sense of mystery and wonderment, like those of her master Manuel Alvarez Bravo. -- Carole Naggar