Emma Scutelnic

A Tree Grows in San Francisco, 2006

Today I'd like to introduce you to another member of Flowers in the Cracks: Emma Scutelnic. She is a photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Specifically, Palo Alto. She lives not far from the first place I worked in California: the old corporate headquarters building of ComputerWare.

I met Emma the night of the 2006 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Freedom Train. She was heading home, and smiled at me when I sang my little heart out at the San Francisco CalTrain station, as I am often wont to do. We struck up a conversation on the ride back home, and we've been good friends since. Emma came with me to the evening with Liz Perle at Books, Inc.

She is originally from Moldova, an Eastern European country bordered by the Prut and Dneister rivers, cozily nestled between Romania and Ukraine.

Since coming here, she has been using her camera to capture images of the San Francisco Bay Area. One of her favorite English expressions is "It is most beautiful." And Emma sees beauty almost everywhere she goes. In every nook and cranny she can see life, no matter how modest.

I'm sure she would laugh and assure me she often sees things that are not very beautiful! Yet still, she has the eyes of an aesthete, a mind and heart of an artist, and a good-natured soul.

Planet Planter, 2006

Seeing the World with Emma's Eyes

Walking sopping wet
Camera-laden grasshopper
Espies the western world
With curious delight

A tree grows in San Francisco
A gnarled vine grips fast to a fence
Clover comes up through the cracks
An ant's-eye view makes a planter immense

Wildly wind-tossed scarf
Whips against the trusty backpack
She explores the world
Capturing life in light

The night after we met, I found Emma's photos elsewhere on the Internet, so I emailed her to continue our friendship and conversation. From the first I was impressed by her artistic sense. One of her photographs is now the background image of my Macintosh desktop. When I first mentioned Flowers in the Cracks to her, she was curious. As we talked, it was soon clear to her this was a project she would like to participate in. Since then she has been going around the Bay Area with her camera in hand and her keen eye to frame the world she lives in.

In the Clover, 2006













These images are from February of 2006. They are part of a series she took for Flowers in the Cracks. Some are in rain and others were in sunshine. We sat together and agreed which of the many photographs we'd put up for this first presentation. For now, we will show those with the a cool, wet nature. The sort of weather that causes us to throw on a sweater and duck indoors. Yet Emma walked about in the elements, considering the theme of the project until she finally found these emergent jewels of light and shape.

Feature & Poem Copyright © 2006 Peter Corless
Images Copyright © 2006 Emma Scutelnic