12
B+Wportraits and off the cuff shots.
To achieve this, Norma left her cardiologist
husband behind for weeks on end, often
taking her two young children on the road
with her, as the circus toured the ‘prison
route’ – a series of unremarkable Californian
towns better known for their penitentiaries.
She would often return home covered in
dust and hay from the various fields in which
they had settled. ‘My family thought I had
lost my mind, and I had,’ she recalls in the
introduction to Circus: A Traveling Life.
The subtitle to this, her debut monograph,was inspired by the performers themselves.
‘When I asked them what they loved
about the circus, they consistently said the
travelling, which to me appeared gruelling,
but to them it was part of their everyday lives.’I
t was these daily lives away from the
evening performances that Norma was
keen to focus upon. At first, the troupe
was sceptical about her motivations and
behaved awkwardly in her presence. ‘It did
take a fair amount of time for me to gain the
trust of people in the circus,’ she explains.‘One issue was language. You see, there were
Russians and Chinese performers who only
spoke a little bit of English and Spanish, since
there were other performers from South
America and Mexico. My other challenge
was that I was photographing performers
who are always posing, when I really wanted
to photograph them as they were.’
Unaccustomed to behaving naturally in
front of even an audience of one, Norma knew
that she would have to put the hours in to find
the right shows. She set about spending days at
a time with a particular section of the troupe
Harlequin Opposite Smoke08-16_CIRCUS ER/MB.indd 1208-16_CIRCUS ER/MB.indd 12 22/01/2015 15:0922/01/2015 15: