Been watching Mark Feddor’s dogs while he’s out of town with his wife and children.  Feddor, affectionately known as “Butterspread,” is a paramedic and one of my former work-partners from days past when I was employed in a local frathouse ambulance company. Think Mother Jugs & Speed meets Super Troopers meets the worst of the Y-chromosome complete with a cast of characters of similar caliber.  The tone for the company was set by its grumpy curmudgeon of an owner who, following a dispute with a local city councilman, had a plaque with the councilman’s name affixed to a cement pig he special-ordered to be placed in front of the ambulance quarters.  This kind of bizarro-renegade theme was mirrored by several of his employees, people like Ricky-Ticky-Time-Bomb, a paramedic known for his Rambo-like obsession affinity for guns.  On at least one occasion, Ticky brought his rifles to work and sighted them in using the owner’s telephone books as backstops to halt the bullets while unsurprised ambulance crews watched television in the living room above his makeshift shooting gallery.  On special occasions, Ricky-Ticky would climb on the company roof dressed head-to-toe in black and shoot bottle rockets at the city police while they checked speeds from the parking lot across the street.  On a scale of one to 10, these antics probably rank at about a five in terms of the kind of strange characters circulating in the company’s 40 year history, though it is no doubt more than enough background to illustrate the point that I worked with some pleasantly unhinged lunatics.

Which brings me back to ol’ Butterspread.  A man of vision and good humor who flinched not one bit when the proposal came down to steal another co-worker’s truck in order to spray-paint it pink before returning it to the lot it was stolen from (email me if you want to see the pictures).  The truck –a 68 Chevy with no working mufflers, two deer heads etched into the back window, and an owner of like disposition –was secreted off to Butterspread’s house, painted with two, big, pink racing stripes, a giant, pink peace sign on the hood, and fixed with a bumper sticker that read “Yield to the Princess” before being returned to the very place it was stolen from.  Butterspread stepped right up and volunteered his house for the job without even bothering to ask his wife (email me if you want to know why he’s still married).  All in a day’s work for the Spread.  

One decade later and that work has yet to be finished.  I have transcribed the dog-care instructions Mark left for me at his house this week.  The text follows:

Hi Matt

Here are the dog instructions.

1) Even though the dogs are getting plenty of exercise by being outside, they still need at least 20 minutes a day of intense play with a human followed by 30 minutes each of snuggle time (they really like it if you play a Disney movie during snuggle time –hint, hint).

2) They have three bowls outside.  Two for water –one, hot, for washing up in before eating, the other, cold, for drinking.  The third is for food.

3) Be sure to sterilize the bowls in between feedings.  We don’t want our precious babies to get the sniffles.

4) As far as food goes, they feed best if you cover your upper torso in peanut butter and cream cheese and roll around in their Kibbles & Bits so they can eat off you.  It is also a bit of play-time for them.

5) After eating and snuggle time they need to go down for a nap.  They really like their comfy, down blanket, some hot cider-tea and play some Sammy Davis Jr. lightly in the background for them.  This way they have happy dreams.

6) Or you could just give them two or three bowls of water and one of food and they’re good.  Either way, really.

7) Thanks, Rose Petal.

8) If they die, I expect a prorated portion of the gas money back.  If one dies, no problem.

9) Let me know what your gas costs.  If 60 isn’t enough, I will get you back.

Thanks, man.

(Click below to see a photograph of the note)

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Photographed Kristi Burton, the 21 year-old spokesperson for Colorado’s recently defeated Amendment 48.  The initiative proposed to alter the state’s constitution in order to define a human being’s “person” at the moment of conception.  The pro-life amendment, voted down by a hefty 73% margin,  posed far-reaching questions, mostly stemming from the Amendment’s potential to modify the definition of “person” in such a way as to upset thousands of unrelated laws containing similar language.

I’ve been completely mesmerized over the course of this last election by conservative appropriation of liberal-ish rhetoric.  In this case, talking points for the Amendment were couched in terms of “equal rights.”  In another measure, using language that is currently being echoed in the Detroit auto debate, a Colorado ballot initiative turned pro-union rhetoric on its head, chopping at Colorado unions under the banner of “Right to Work.”  My favorite little chunk of linguistic brownie, though, comes from this year’s Republican National Convention when the assembled crowd broke into spontaneous chants of “Drill, Baby.  Drill!”

Drill-Baby, a spinoff of the original “Burn, Baby.  Burn!” coined by R&B disc jockey Magnificent Montague, was first used in protest during the racially-charged Watts Riots of 1965.  Then again paired with the burning of draft cards in protest of the Vietnam War.  And, of course, for flag burning  –can’t forget that.  

If irony came in flavors, this one would taste just like a big, brimming glass of East Texas Crude. 

Mmmmm.  

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“The Kansas prairie was not settled by famous persons who lived on in national legendary form, but by common men and women with a heartfelt desire for a new chance in life, for a dream, and for some, adventure.  Their individual stories are not recounted in major publications or textbooks, only in generalities.”  

-Connie M. Bowman, excerpted from the foreword of The Life and Legacy of William Faulds Miller and Mary Craig Muir

For the last month I have been sorting through and restoring old family photographs, prints, tintypes, and plates made around the mid-to-late 1800s, roughly corresponding to the time that one set of my great-great grandparents emigrated from Scotland to Canada.  The images come from a wide, geographic berth stretching from Nova Scotia to Iowa, representing different steps along the route which carried this particular piece of my family westward to where many of them homesteaded the Kansas prairie.  Of the two velvet-covered albums present in my Grandma’s linen room in the months before her death, only one set of images remains intact, the others parted out by relatives in the bustle to divide property.  Those pictures that do remain tell an interesting story that goes beyond the objective blush of the photograph.  The images represent the momentary meeting of the person as they were with the person who they wanted to be, something that Avedon describes as the subject’s complicit participation and the photographer’s willing subjectivity in the process of creating a photograph.

Or, in less esoteric terms, these aren’t photographs of people –they are photographs of their dreams.

The era of the daguerreotype was, photographically speaking, something on par with the Gutenberg press in that the production of portraits, like book copies, were no longer relegated to the lengthy process of hand-copy.  The notion of self-representation became a service afforded to a ”large variety of groups previously excluded from official portraiture. Seamstresses, carpenters, actors, goldminers, and even the recently deceased.”  And, incidentally, to my farming ancestors as well.

Photographic studios –most notably those located in New York’s Bowery that catered to freshly landed immigrants –were often elaborately decorated, complete with wardrobes of fine clothing so those sitting for their portraits could present themselves as having realized the American dream.  Many of these photographs were returned home overseas as a memento of a successful journey, evidence of that the choice to make the three month boat trip for a new life had been worth the risk.

The fascinating thing about these prints is the gap separating what the photograph purports to represent from the conditions under which their subjects lived.  Far from being learned noblemen who had realized their fortune, these photographs were made at a time of great uncertainty as the family bounced slowly westward waiting for land-grant applications to clear, sleeping under the canvas removed from their wagon, wintering in an abandoned sod hut, and generally, living on scrap. In that small sense, the photographs are, arguably, lies.  

In the bigger sense, though, these images tell the deeper truth about the life their subjects hoped for, the way they wanted to be viewed, their dreams in the greater context of their struggle.  That is to say that the lie is really only a wish in disguise.

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Honored to be included among this year’s American Photo 24 ‘Chosen’ images.  They selected three pictures from a really diverse cross-section of work to appear in the online edition including the image above, a 737 descending through the clouds over Washington, D.C., a Polaroid of my favorite neighbor, retired truck driver Arthur “Red” Holloway,” and an image of an immigrant who was dismembered by a Mexican freight train on his northward journey.  The entry is available here.  

Red doesn’t know that we’ve won yet.  Think I’ll tell him on saturday when I’m supposed to help him repost his fence.  I think he’ll get a kick out of it.

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There’s a lot of geeky stuff to be excited about in Tim’s re-design of my new website –one click uploads, automatic image captioning, a fully-customizable & visual backend, integrated blog, search engine optimization –but let’s just talk about the photographs.  THIRTEEN INCH IMAGES that load quicker than most web-images half that size.  I’m definitely grateful for his help and attention in trying to make the web play photos like a big, glossy magazine.

And, for anyone surfing for new content, I just finished uploading a new gallery of Polaroid Images from the DNC and RNC right here.

DEN-ABQ-DEN, 29 hours.  I had a professor who once said that if Keats were alive today, he’d be touring in a rock ‘n roll band, that the closest thing the 19th century ever got to cultural freedom was embodied in the romantic poets.  After more than four years of photographing the fauna native to the island of Denver –a place that has historically served as a shelter from the streamlined pop-culture machines on both of the nation’s coasts –I finally got a chance to  get in the van for a whirlwind trip across the high desert with Bongo Fury for their show in nothing less bizarre than a tiki bar in downtown Albuquerque.  I guess, in a way, it is kind of like island hopping in the south Pacific.  Lots of ocean separating two isolated and colorful destinations.  

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[From a series of Polaroids taken on the Colorado-Oklahoma border]

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Spent Halloween weekend with some of my good friends working on a new chapter for my Gun Culture U.S.A. project.  This is the second big-game hunt that I have been on in as many months and, definitely, a much different flavor from some of the other elements of the story.  The hunt is, by nature, a primal thing, something that is not exactly a part of a visit to the meat aisle of the grocery store.  This deer was taken on absolutely beautiful, flat, cow country on the Colorado-Oklahoma border, the high desert of old Mexico along an isolated trucking route connecting the southern states to the western heartland.

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