It’s six hours from Denver to the Comanche National Grasslands. Eight or ten or something like that if you drive without purpose. I stopped counting at dark. Denver to Trinidad, Trinidad east on dirt county roads for another 100 miles. Doesn’t seem like much from eye level, but if you take it slow, the flat Colorado plains share smaller secrets, a hidden landscape in negative relief, canyons that slice the land in such a way that they’re almost imperceptible until you’re balanced right at the edge. It’s the third deer hunt I’ve photographed in the last 12 months, the second one with friends of mine who make this trip every year. A little bit about the deer, a little more about getting out and slowing down for a week. Life always waits just up the highway, no need to rush it along. It’s always there when you get back.
Trying to catch up on old work this evening. I’ve been shooting a near-booked schedule for the last couple weeks. Found myself in three different states, spent a night sleeping in an empty horse stall at the Wyoming State Fair, pulled an all-nighter in Kansas chasing nocturnal creatures for the Audubon Society’s magazine, picked up a rental car that ran out of gas 30 miles from anywhere at 2 am in Wyoming, realized that the particular car I rented showed 1/8th of a tank of gas when it was really on E, spent the night on the side of the interstate photographing the stars while I waited for the tow service to bring me some gas –all the while making a list in my head of all the things waiting for me to catch up on when I got home.
Blogging a couple recent assignments chalks up as one of the easier things on that list (blogging the bigger projects I’ve been shooting is another story).
This is Connie Paeglow an advocate of the Five Wishes advanced directive form. The Five Wishes program is designed to facilitate end-of-life decisions for people facing issues related to death and dying. Paeglow became engaged with the program during the death of her late husband in 2003. She credits the program with helping her through the process of discussing difficult issues with her husband and his family.
You know before you even touch the shutter that they’re going to hate the picture. All the tricks that photographers use to make a photograph flattering are kinda pulled out from under you by the procedures set forth by the United States Department of State ‘Composition Checklist’ for making what they call a “successful photo.” No hats, no glasses, no outrageous jewelry, neutral expression, flat light –it all culminates in a photograph that is hard to be proud of and even harder to hand to someone without apologizing.
Today was the third citizenship drive that I’ve participated in as a photographer, a half-day of going through the rote, formulaic process of making photographs for people who will be applying for a passport with the ultimate goal of earning their citizenship. These workshops give immigrants the opportunity to visit with lawyers, specialists, and volunteers who help with all kinds of administrative fun (like making the right number of photocopies and filing papers in the right order). I’ve been collecting photographs from these events in a folder on my drive and finally crossed the 100-picture threshold this afternoon. As a composite, these boring little squares tell a not-so-boring story about real people playing this strange game of bureaucratic chess.
And for people who believe in this kind of work, here’s a couple Colorado-based organizations working on these much-needed clinics:
Luceo’s own Tim Lytvinenko has been a creative force in recent days, turning out a couple of fun, little stop motion shorts. He’s on a cross-country trip right now, due in my home-city of Denver any day now, as he makes his way from Raleigh to San Francisco with his partner at Well Done Media. Anyhow, the shorts are fun and it’d be criminal not to share.
I agreed sometime during the daylight hours to help friends move an organ. It was something that I had done in passing while the sun was still out, full well knowing that I had meetings that would run through the evening hours and then some business to catch up on thereafter. I arrived for the move late, close to midnight. Tripp was busy scrubbing the baseboard in his room while Zach gathered trash bags to set out on the curb. June 30th with a July 1st deadline to vacate the house. Moving is something that is rarely accomplished with any time left to spare. It is a sport for procrastinators.
At midnight, the house was almost clean. The only things left were details. A few boxes here and there, a little cleaning, and the chore of capturing one of Tripp’s semi-feral cats from the crawl space where it had barricaded itself against the impending move. The basement appeared as a coal shaft, lightless, humid, hot. At it’s narrowest point, little more than three feet separated the subfloor of the house from the dirt and junk that had been backfilled into the void over the course of decades. Mining for cats, or so it appeared as Tripp drug a work-light into the dusty abyss.
Within an hour, the cat had given up. Tired of running tiny laps through its subterranean hideout, the kitty carrier became the easiest option for a beast inclined towards idleness. With the cat back in the bag, the final task of the night shifted to the original goal of delivering the organ to its new home on the other side of the city.
Musical instruments, like cameras, are things that change hands. They are tools that creative people hate to see wasted such that when it becomes untenable to keep them any longer, they are not tossed out with the garbage. These things are passed on to other people with the hope that, in their next life, they will no longer sit idle, rather be the channel through which masterpieces are moved. Zach’s oversized church organ, a solid block of wood and electronics weighing in at only slightly less than a full-size upright piano, had sat broken in the back room of the old rental for a period of years before the move-out gave him the impetus to find a new home for it. John, a musician and de facto dead organ junk-piler, had amassed a small heap of the bulky instruments in the back of his warehouse space. A perfect fit. He agreed to take it. Perhaps he would be able to fix it or, perhaps, it would make an interesting prop to fill space between the cinder block walls. Either way, it was better than dumping it in the alley.
Kayfabe is the unsaid rule that luchadores should stay in character both inside the ring and out. In the context of theater, it encourages the suspension of disbelief but also goes a step further by carrying the story off the stage and into the lives of the spectators. Kayfabe is to make Peter Pan real, giving life to the notion that things can be imagined into existence. It reminds us that those things we dream are not that far out of reach and refreshes our faith in the collective fairy tale where good triumphs over evil and struggle is always rewarded.
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Went to a lucha libre match this past weekend. A few days prior to going, a friend of mine introduced me to filmmakers Kim Shively and Chris Bagely, two people whose work I have been following over the last couple of years. The trailers for Wesley Willis’s Joyrides, their recently released full-length documentary on the late, great rock ‘n roller, started popping up on the internet last year coinciding with the film’s tour through the festival circuit. The duo’s DIY approach to filmmaking and niche interest in the strange, beautiful, and raw subculture is something that I have always found inspiring.
Their latest project focuses on lucha libre and looks to be a promising follow-up to the Willis work. So when they offered tickets to join them at a lucha match they were filming over the weekend, I couldn’t say no. And I couldn’t put my camera down, either.
It was the third time in my life that I’ve stumbled into a big cat. The first, a bobcat bounding over snow drifts alongside the road as I walked home from fifth grade, silent and swift, gone in a flash like some terrestrial-tethered shooting star. Years later, a mountain lion traipsing across a Forest Service two-track in the piñon savannah of northern Arizona. Dusk on the painted desert, the cat picked up its head looked right at my pickup, and continued unhurried off into the brush. The last cat I damn near ran over, speeding along a dirt road slicing through the natural gas fields of the Wyoming Rockies. The tuft-eared, nip-tailed bob had been stalking a rabbit on the opposite side of the road when I came around the bend, interrupting his hunt. It surprised me to find that the cat is so much faster than a 20th of a second, the blurry orange-ish spot on the two frames I took bear the only evidence of my chance encounter. Perhaps these animals aren’t meant to be taken for souvenirs, their story best told in glimpses, haiku, concise riddles rather than epic tales.
Drove by a little grassfire on Denver’s eastern edge today. Somewhat surreal because the fire was burning inside of a retention dam through a bunch of dried cattails surrounding the shallow pools of water in the low points on the landscape. Funny to photograph this stuff after working big wildfire for seven years; it’s hard not to armchair quarterback and, well, for a fire surrounded on all sides by roads and lush golf greens, this thing probably could have been left to burn itself out and the resulting black spot on the landscape would have been exactly the same size and shape as it ended up after all the attention it received.
Still, the one thing that I miss about the smoke from wildfire is how dreamlike it makes the landscape, how the light is diffused through it like a soft disco ball dappling everything in smooth brushstrokes. It’s a secret project that I started shooting a few years back, something that I’d like to pick back up again, assignment permitting.
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