Dora, the swallow who brings summer

My mind works through associations. One memory calls up another, an image finds its way to a book, and a recent trip resurfaces when something before my eyes offers a point of connection.

That is what happened with Dora Varella, the athlete in the photograph. Her flight immediately brought to mind the swallows that, at the end of the day, announce the approach of summer. I imagined she might have the power to produce, through parthenogenesis, tiny Doras to join her in a flock flying out over the sea.

I had just returned from the Pantanal when I remembered Casé, o jacaré que anda em pé, by Carlos Eduardo Novaes. The story of the animals facing the construction of a shopping mall amid the flooded wetlands of that vast plain felt especially close to me.

The two memories converged in Salvador. The photograph was made in front of All Saints Bay, in a relationship with nature different from the one found in Novaes’s book. With the titles she won at that competition, Dora became the meeting point of these images. The girl who brought summer to Bahia came to exist, for me, within a literature of her own.

People come to Bahia in search of sun and blue skies. That weekend, Dora brought summer with her; in a land sought out for its sunshine, she even made it rain, and rain hard. As my late father used to say, she did the hair, the beard, and the mustache too.

Perhaps a photograph can do that: bring together experiences that belonged to different times and places, allowing a girl in motion to carry with her a book, a landscape, a journey, and a rainstorm.