Lobster Salad

Some photographs give me things I never asked for. In this one, skateboarding opened a passage back to a kitchen I left behind.

I was a cook, and in Spain I studied Gastronomía y Cultura Española in Seville. Barcelona, however, was where I lived the longest, and where Mediterranean cuisine became a larger part of my experience. At a three-Michelin-star restaurant where I worked, lobsters arrived alive every day in the late afternoon. Their tails were held shut with thick blue rubber bands, like the ones used to keep money together. They had to be restrained to prevent accidents. I liked that visible force.

In the photograph, the athlete’s leg folded across his torso brought that tail back to me. The skateboarder’s body offers a new position for a familiar form I already know. The skin, intensified by the red, adds what was missing: I see a gray bowl, warm-edged, holding a finished salad, finely sliced by hand. I imagine the final addition of lobster meat and a drizzle of olive oil, known here in Brazil as azeite doce, a term I never adopted. After all, olive oils can be fruity, bitter, pungent, and sometimes astringent, but not sweet. I do understand the comparison with dendê, however.

The photograph begins to function like a kitchen: elements from different origins enter the same composition and produce a new experience. Nothing has to stop being what it is in order to occupy another place.

Perhaps that is why I also think about the table. Gastronomy, sport, and photography demand more than individual experience. I like seeing them circulate through the company of interesting people. Without that presence, solitude can sometimes become the more honest choice.