I Stumbled Upon

Right near to the place where Napoleon fought the Battle of Marengo in 1800 - deafeating the Austrians and expelling them from North-Western Italy - there is an old sugar mill, built in 1900 and abandoned in the 1980s.

There were plans to convert the buildings commercially, but the discovery of large amounts of heavy pollutants in the soil, caused by the nearby Solvay factory, and the resulting huge cleanup costs stopped everything.

These photos are from 2010, the sugar factory is still there. The bright blue on the wall of one photo is due to the asbestos removal works.

Spinetta Marengo, Italy.

© Roberto Conte (2010)

Everyday Poetry - "Act so that the effects of your actions are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life." Hans Jonas

MARIANNE WIGGINS Toronto 1990

American novelist Marianne Wiggins had only recently been thrust into a global spotlight when Iran pronounced its infamous fatwa on her then-husband, Salman Rushdie, the year before I made these portraits at the Toronto authors festival. It was hard to be unaware of all of this but, looking back, I don’t seem to remember any looming security presence during my session with her, in the waterfront hotel that hosted the festival. Looking back I’m sure it was unwelcome attention for someone whose own career had been progressing as steadily as Rushdie’s until he provoked the fundamentalist regime and put her just off centre of a target that, as we would learn many years later, Rushdie was never able to shrug off.

Marianne Wiggins was born in Pennsylvania in 1947 and published her first novel, Babe, in 1975. She was able to make a living from her writing with the publication of Separate Checks nine years later and married Salman Rushdie in 1988, a year before she brought out John Dollar, her breakthrough book, which won her the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize the same year she received the Whiting Award for emerging writers. That was the same year the fatwa was pronounced on Rushdie, and although she had told him she wanted to leave him a few days beforehand, Wiggins went into hiding with Rushdie. In 1995 she published Eveless Eden, a story about a photographer and a war correspondent, from an idea suggested to her by Rushdie.

Marianne Wiggins’ daughter is the photographer Lara Porzak, and she has made a photographer a character in her books twice – in Eveless Eden and The Shadow Catcher, which contains two timelines, one featuring the great portraitist Edward Curtis and the other a writer named Marianne Wiggins. I couldn’t know any of this when I photographed her in 1990, in the same spot in the lobby of the Harbour Castle hotel where, two years earlier, I’d taken portraits of Jerzy Kosinski, Jay McInerney, Andrei Bitov and Kathy Acker. She was very animated and willing to take whatever minimal direction I gave her, and I remember being pleased because my favorite shots were full-length portraits instead of the tight close-ups I defaulted to whenever I needed a safe option during a shoot.

Wiggins would divorce Salman Rushdie in 1993 and after living all over Europe would begin teaching at the University of Southern California in 2005. (For what it’s worth, I have always thought Wiggins was a more enjoyable writer than her ex-husband, not to diminish what Rushdie has gone through since he provoked the lasting ire of not just a tyrannical theocracy but fundamentalists all over the globe.) In 2016 Wiggins suffered a stroke and had to teach herself how to read and write, and was able to finish her latest novel Properties of Thirst with the help of her daughter.

茶屋への路

© Pierre Gable 2026

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