Bruce Spear

About Me

I'm a photographer, teacher, and tango dancer (!) living in Berlin.

Why do you write?

Hell if I know what fuels my creativity, apart from sleep, coffee, and angst. It must have to do with childhood traumas, but my Gestalt therapist refuses to talk about it, offering some theory about the past being past and the future being where it's at.

I write when I can't sleep or sit still or go out and photograph or concentrate on the other things I am supposed to be doing. Sometimes after writing I can get back to sleep or resolve to do something or see the world with what I think might be more clarity, and sometimes I'll spend all morning writing about everything else but the thing I am supposed to be writing about and then, with only an hour or two, finally get to the point of it as if I had been doing the research all along -- which I guess is what I'd been doing.

Any favorite authors? Books?

After my first semester in art school I flew to Cambridge, rented a room down the street from where I used to live, and before calling up my old friends read Moby Dick, and then to be sure I understood it read it again, and then I spent a week visiting my friends and doing temp work for my flight back, as it happened, for only $35. on an empty Northwest jumbo being ferried from Boston to Detroit: "We'd like to welcome our twenty-five passengers to deluxe 747 service to Detroit.." and so I returned to my photography.

A few years later I was teaching photo and decided to read Proust, and for the same reason read that twice, too, first the Moncrieff and then the Kilmartin translations. I thought the writer wrote like how I had learned how to walk through fields and gardens, paying attention to the light and form, enjoying the play of memory and desire, and waiting for the moment when the attention and play struck gold.

My absolute favorite book in the past couple of years is "Tango: the art history of love", by the Yale historian Robert Farris Thompson, because this book helped me to see how this wonderful dance which I took up almost five years ago and have been training, practicing, and enjoying many times each week ever since incorporates the energies, feelings, images, gesture, and music of African, Caribbean, European, and South American cultures, and has been learned and transmitted, as I have been learning and sharing it with others, through imitation, play, and good fun. I love reading, writing, cooking, and caring, and photographing is my art, but this business of dancing is something else entirely, and I think it is because then I get to move, practice standing and walking, get to connect with others rather intimately yet safely, enjoy fabulous, and be a part of something larger than myself -- this urban culture that, as Thompson (and others) show, reaches back, decade by decade, to people enjoying the very same things, in many places, over a very long time, connecting me to African village cultures even, what with the dancing counter-clockwise, the drummers commanding, daring us to dance, and so taking from and adding to the collective fire.

It all fits together. After work and all this writing, the dance offers a break; having danced, sweated, and pleasured, I am relaxed and have something else to write about. There is an odd loneliness to the writing (and for me, the photographing), which the dance helps correct; conversely, when dancing, we dancers are airheads -- which is half the point, of course -- and so must go back to our "day jobs", and for some, our writing. These businesses, then, are complementary.

Anticipating a community of writers on the web, this one, is for me new.