Artist refuses to quit despite losing an eye
MIAMI (AP) – In one corner of the four-by-four-foot canvas, green and orange blend and swirl like tie-dye. In another, San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts floats on a cloud.
Below, the old Key West Bridge stretches across blue bay waters. Its vanishing point lies behind Rome’s historic Fountain of Triton: a half-man, half-fish blowing into a conch.
Called The Reason Travel Inspires Me to Create, it’s the singular artistic expression of a photographer who sees the world in a singular way – literally.
Lorraine Boogich was 17 when a car wreck all but sheared off the right side of her face.
“The eye was basically crushed,” she said. Doctors “didn’t even know where it was. . . . After a few hours in surgery, they found it in the cheek cavity.”
Reset in the socket, the blind eye gradually atrophied, becoming so painful and distracting that she couldn’t take pictures.
Boogich, 26, had it removed earlier this year and replaced with a blue-green prosthetic, the installation of which capped nine years of skin grafts, bone grafts and hair transplants to repair the accident’s damage.
Through it all, Boogich, of North Miami Beach, developed a clear vision for her future.
The one-time aspiring film director, a 2007 Barry University graduate, is launching a career in fine-art and commercial photography while working at Gallery Art in Aventura.
“Sharing the way I see the world has been a desire of mine,” said Boogich, who especially likes travel and architectural photography. “Do I see things differently? I always have.”
Yet she laughs when recalling being dragged to New York art museums as a child, “seeing Jackson Pollack and insisting that wasn’t art; I could do that. Now I love modern art because I understand the ideas behind a lot of the pieces.”
Influenced by the Surrealists, she takes a different approach “almost every time I have an idea,” such as recently photographing an architectural series with a toy camera.
“And I really like doing stuff at night because it captures a whole different energy. There’s not really any people around, so it feels unique to the viewer.”
Boogich describes her own creations as “a reflection of the impression left upon me by my physical surroundings.”
“Often I try to expose hidden beauty in the mundane. . . . Experimentation and my attraction toward the eccentric push me to look beyond the surface in order to capture the true essence of my subject whether it be living, natural or man-made,” she said.
Her work already has been featured in View Camera magazine and shown at the Miami Children’s Museum. The “travel inspiration” piece – computer-manipulated images shot with a large-format camera in Europe and around the United States – recently hung at Churchill’s Pub in Northeast Miami, part of an exhibit by artists calling themselves the Luminos Collective.
Last January, Boogich and several friends from Barry formed the collective “to get group shows and help keep each other creating.”
For the Churchill’s show, four of them collaborated on a mixed-media-on-plexiglass panel, melding photography, drawing, graphic design and painting.
She showed some of her work during Art Basel week at venues not affiliated with the event: Wallflower Gallery in downtown Miami and the Playground Theater in Miami Shores.
Despite the horrific injury and laborious recovery, Boogich was an outstanding student at Barry, where she wowed teachers with her dedication, talent and confidence.
For months, she said nothing about her scars. Then she happened to see photos that Fine Arts Department Chairwoman Silvia Lizama shot of her son’s hand, badly injured in a car accident.
“Lorraine came in while I was laying them out, and she said, ‘I’ve never been able to look at pictures of my own accident.'”
To that point, no one at Barry knew what had caused her scars, or whether her unmoving right eye could see – not realizing it was a ceramic “shell” that looked like an eyeball.
Her left eye is slightly nearsighted, so she wears glasses.
When she finally opened up, Boogich “didn’t let on that it was going to slow her down,” Lizama said. “She’s an overachiever. She’s very strong.”
On Jan. 31, 2000, Lorraine Boogich was headed home to Orlando from a day trip to Daytona Beach.
She was driving her car, with a friend. Eight other friends and acquaintances in a separate car led the way.
It was after dark, and “on I-4, all of a sudden my car dies. We’re miles away from a phone in the middle of nowhere” near DeLand, she recalled. The second car returned, then a police officer arrived and told the teens to leave.
“I left a note on my car, and he watches all 10 of us squeeze into a two-door Chevy Cavalier,” Boogich said.
“The driver wasn’t someone I wanted to be in the car with. I didn’t like the way she drove.”
After a pit stop “just a few exits away from somebody’s house where we could stay,” the driver sped up to 100 mph.
“I remember looking over at how fast she was going and telling my friend I was really scared,” Boogich said. “I closed my eyes and put my head on my friend’s shoulder. I was in the front seat with my friend. . . . I always wear my seat belt, but it wouldn’t fit around both of us.”
As the speeding Chevy overtook a slower car in its lane, its driver slammed on the brakes and jerked the wheel to the shoulder, blowing a back tire. The Chevy flipped and spun.
“Instinctively, I put my hands to my face,” Boogich said. “The car rolled on my side. . . . All the glass broke and my head impacted with the ground.”
Hers were the only serious injuries.
The driver who caused the accident pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, and her insurance paid to the policy limit of $10,000.