Rosalie Acinapura, a photographer who lives in Wellfleet, has been taking photographs most of her life. She’s prolific, and her vision is wide-ranging. She takes photographs wherever she is, on the Cape or in Paris, where she spends a month each year, and her subjects range from sand patterns on the beach to the interiors of art museums. —Abraham Storer
Q: How did you get interested in making abstract photographs?
Years ago, I was taking photos of people. When I came up here in the early 1980s, I took a lot of nature shots, and then I started doing abstract photographs.
I started seeing things differently. In Paris, I started taking photographs through bus windows. Then I started taking a lot of pictures through windows, often store windows that were made of old glass. This photograph is looking through the window at a road in Wellfleet. It’s a distortion of the landscape.
Q. Why do you take photographs through windows?
I like the distortion and mystery. They’re very painterly. I paint with my camera.
Q. Do you think about the windows metaphorically?
No. I just like photographing through them because I like the images. Although when I started taking them on the bus in Paris, I would take a picture of the people who got off the bus or the people walking by. I thought, “Gee, I wonder what they’re thinking or what their life is like.” But I’ll never know them. There’s mystery in these pictures.
Q. Are there other projects where you’ve played with abstraction?
I did a whole series photographing shadows of Brancusi sculptures. They were different shades of gray. For a while I was taking photographs of different colored walls meeting the carpet in museums. They were abstractions as well.
Q. Do you do much editing of your photographs?
I don’t do anything to the photographs. Rarely, I will crop, but usually I shoot it, and I like it.
Q. How does your rhythm of taking photographs change in the off-season?
I do a lot more photographs in the winter. It’s just me in nature without a lot of people.
In winter you can see nature by itself. There’s no greenery. It’s just the bare lines of the trees.
