It is, quite honestly, hard to fight it all. There is a reason that Monday seems like Tuesday, which seems like last Thursday, or Sunday. I can’t — and don’t care to — remember what happened then.
One recent night, during a bout of insomnia, I was hit with a stark thought. Actually, it was really more of a command:
“Get your mind working again.”
I thought about this for an hour or so, mulling the contours of the phrase. I know what “get your mind working” literally means, but the path wasn’t evident to me. I have things to do, projects that I’m working on, and I’m struggling to get them done. It’s all the other crap that’s getting in the way, making those things more difficult to accomplish.
A day later, in a little bit of serendipity, I read an interview with Jerry Seinfeld in the New York Times. It was an interesting read, but I was struck immediately by what he said when asked about how he’s working through isolation:
“I still have a writing session every day. It’s another thing that organizes your mind. The coffee goes here. The pad goes here. The notes go here. My writing technique is just: You can’t do anything else. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else. The writing is such an ordeal. That sustains me.”
What Seinfeld articulated so crisply is what my brain was saying to me the other night: get out there and work on your craft.
It is hard, and it should be hard. It can’t be any other way. Work to overcome the noise as best you can, by doing the things you need to be doing. Not those projects necessarily, but that which you feel you are here to do.
The word I missed in the phrase, “get your mind working again,” was ‘your.’ That little word was an acknowledgement and an admonition. There are things that I can change in my world, as tough as they might be. It is time to get cracking, and move the crap to the side of the desk, however difficult it might be.
This is not a new idea to me; it is not a lightning bolt of realization. I have been a writer and an editor for a long time, and my college writing professor gave me this mantra years ago: “Write. [pause] Write. [pause] Write. [pause] If you want to be a writer, write.”
To which I now add: “Shoot. [pause] Shoot. [pause] Shoot. [pause] If you want to be a photographer, shoot.”
Given the amplitude of noise in the world right now, it’s good to be reminded of this. Even before I read the Seinfeld interview, I had already started down the path: I spent yesterday out with a camera, forcing myself to shoot in unfamiliar places, with a lens of an unusual focal length for me. (One more suited to portraits than landscapes.) It was hard, and, while I didn’t end up with anything of great note, I did work my mind.
And today?
Today, I am writing.
Little victories, my friends. Little victories.
thx – and a fist bump – Duncan
]]>These three images are part of a recent project, West. It is something that has been in the back of my mind for the last few years, and it started coming together thematically over the past year.
As an East Coast boy growing up in the tight spaces of suburbia, the idea of ‘the West’ fascinated me almost from the time I was old enough to read. It was not really the cowboys and Native Americans in books and Western movies that captured my imagination: it was the deserts and the mesas, and the mountains and great rivers (and dams), and the open spaces. Looking at maps of the United States, it was clear that there was something big there, and I wanted to see it.
It was only after I moved to California in the early 1990s that I realized that the West was an amorphous, unwieldy thing, messy and quite unlike the images buried in my head. It seemed too big to me—and a bit unreal—and was clearly based on a romantic notion that didn’t exist. In those early years out West, I explored a small bit of the Southwestern deserts and some of the Rockies, Cascades and Sierras, but my work, along with raising a family, kept big explorations far from my world.
After Lee passed in 2013, I had a series of vivid dreams about the desert, which rekindled a yearning to explore those places that had so long been in my head. Starting in 2016, my new wife Susan and I wandered and camped through California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Oregon and Washington (among other places). We explored deserts and the mountains throughout the West, and I discovered a rather amazing feeling: that of becoming grounded in the world, of being of a place at a moment in time.
The photographer in me has spent many parts of these travels searching for photos in the landscape. I have wanted nothing more than to capture that feeling of being grounded in a place, but I also wanted photographs that felt like ‘me.’ Last spring, in California’s magnificent Owens Valley, I took the shot shown above (center). That was the first time that all of this stuff—the West, being grounded, sensing a place, and trying to be an artist—merged for me.
The other two photos are more of this: the Joshua tree after sundown, with the gorgeous gradient of the evening desert sky; and the stately old tree standing alone in Washington’s Palouse on a beautiful night in May. Both of these photos speak of the variety of the West, of my West, and I can still sense the moment that I took them, which is a generally new phenomenon to me. (It is worth noting that these last two photos were taken out in the field with my dear friend Hudson, who, along with my old friend Duncan, has been one of my photographic mentors. These men have been part of my tribe for a long time.)
I printed a limited edition of the three photos shown here, and sent them out to a group of friends as a surprise in this time of isolation and quarantine. A small thing, something to hold in the hand, and possibly bring a smile to one’s face. Something to give away, to hide in a book, or to put somewhere to be seen for a while, like a flower. I put a small note in with the photos:
I know—and teach—that art is personal, and I don’t pretend to say that these photos are representative of great art, or even beauty. They are, however, of places and times that are dear to me, and they represent the peace and solitude that I look for when I’m out in the world with my camera.
I’ll post more over time, but I wanted to start somewhere.
Peace.
]]>From a workshop I co-taught with Hudson Henry in Moab, October 2019. We stuck around to photograph the Milky Way, but none of those shots turned out to my liking. This one (and another, which I’ll post subsequently) was. It’s a beautiful print, btw.
]]>I have just returned from a tour of the deserts of the Southwest: Death Valley, Palm Desert, Joshua Tree, and the Valley of Fire. It was good for Susan and me to be down that way: the desert nourishes us, especially in the late winter and early spring. I also received a lovely gift during our trip: the welcome return of the photographic spirit, which had been largely absent for me last year.
Today, as I was editing some photos from the trip, I learned that an old friend, Richard Wanderman, passed away earlier this month while I was largely incommunicado. I had known that he was seriously ill, and that his illness was most likely terminal, but I had hoped that he might make a bit of a recovery. He was often on my mind during my travels, but I wasn’t online enough to check about his condition.
I’ve known Richard in one way or another since the 1980s: he was a subscriber to my newsletter MacInTouch (which I published with my friend Ric), although our interactions were largely at trade shows. After a number of years in the ‘90s where we had minimal contact, Richard reconnected with me on Flickr. Since that time, we have had a wonderful ongoing photographic discussion, with the occasional detour into personal topics. Richard was one of the people who commented regularly on my essays and photographs, and he had deeply felt words of encouragement and care for me during Lee’s illness and after her death. I valued our connection, even if it was electronic and occasional.
Richard was a good writer; his blog is filled with interesting words, photos he liked, and links to things he thought worthy of mention. He loved photography in all its forms but was largely a practitioner of black and white (of which I am clearly not) and we had a few discussions about the merits of that particular genre. His eye, when curating black-and-white shots around the web, was quite good, which you can see if you walk through the Photography section of his blog.
While I was out shooting this past month, I kept thinking that I needed to create at least one black-and-white photo for Richard, whether it be for him to see or in remembrance of him. I don’t know what he would have thought of this shot—he was quite the critic—but I truly had hoped that we would have had one last exchange before he passed.
Godspeed, Richard. I will miss seeing your avatar light up one of my posts, and I will miss the dialog that we had over the years.
[click on the photo above to view it full-screen]
]]>It was as beautiful a summer morning as Portland can bring: sunny and warm, with a slight breeze and that low humidity that makes the days (and nights) so comfortable. With the sunshine filling our room, the birds singing, and the sounds of the waking city drifting in through the window, we lingered over this last familiar, comfortable, and loving moment between the two of us.
Lee and I had slept in the same bed together for the first time in months. The year before, when her illness had made it difficult for either of us to get a good night’s sleep, we set up a small, comfortable bed for Lee in Liz’s old room on the first floor. It was an arrangement constructed out of pain, and it reluctantly worked for both of us, but the previous night it just made sense to be together. Thankfully, we had slept deeply and woke up refreshed, which, as I think about it today, was not wholly unexpected.
So much of the previous year had been each of us trying not to dwell on an event—mundane or great—as being the “last” of something, but on this day, this sad and beautiful Friday, we had finally reached the end of that game. Lee had her last cup of decaf espresso, a last piece of toast with homemade jam, and her last morning cocktail of morphine and assorted medications. Most of Lee’s friends had already said goodbye, either explicitly or implicitly, so it was just the kids and us for most of that day.
I don’t actually recall much of what I did that morning, other than drinking my usual two cups of espresso. My regimen for the past year had been one of intense, tightly focused caretaking, but during that whole last week, my daily impulsion had been replaced by some other force, and Lee and I were comfortable and calm.
Calm. It is the word that I associate most with that day, that last day with my wife of 28 years. And in the five years since her death, I keep coming back to that morning, and the calmness that we both had, despite each of us knowing what would take place later, in the warm afternoon, in the house that had been our cherished home for more than a dozen years.
I am grateful for that memory, that remembrance of calmness on such a terrible day. I thought I would have wanted to hate that day, to crumple it up and toss it into the dark reaches of my brain, but I do not. Instead, it represents the culmination of two lives together, two lives that lived as beautifully—and with as much authenticity—as a couple can. And when the calendar moves each year towards July 12, I feel real sadness at what could have been, and great joy and appreciation at the beauty of the life that it was.
Regardless as to how much I have come to embrace the day that Lee died, “five” has been an oncoming milestone of dread; it has consumed inordinate amounts of of my mental state for months. I have thought about the places that I have been, the things that I have done, the things that I haven’t, and the memories of a life that sadly fade with time. Most importantly, however, I have thought about the other people I have lost in in the past five years: my dear father; my friends David, Scott and Tom; and, just last month, Lee’s brother, Mardy.
Mardy’s death was sudden and unexpected, and as such, was unbelievably painful for those of us who never got to say farewell. Like Lee, Mardy left behind a son, a daughter, a mother and a sister. They have only now started down the trail of grief, and I walk with them in sadness. As it was with Lee, I know that the route will not be easy, nor will it be quick to reduce the anger and the pain in our hearts. We will, however, each find our own ways to move forward and celebrate a life well lived. This understanding will not replace the loss of Mardy’s presence in our lives, but it is all part of the necessary process of recovery.
As I look back over these past five years, I marvel at some things, cry at others, and still feel a hole that will never get filled. I am truly grateful that I found a wonderful, deep love, one that doesn’t require anything other than my heart—and my presence—to be validated. I am also thankful that I remain close to my daughter, who reminds me of her mother in beautiful, heart-warming ways, but who also remains her own woman, something her mother would have loved to have seen.
What is most surprising to me after five years, however, is the sheer magic in the way that life expands and propels us forward, undeterred by single events. I can look back at July 12, 2013 as a very specific, sad point in time for me, a terrible event that closed one great portion of my life, but it also opened another. And the dispersion of life that has happened in the interim—new homes, new loves, friends moving away and getting married, babies being born, adventures in faraway places, and yes, even death—remains the most important (and healthy) element of my world today.
That expansion, which takes the atom of a moment, intertwines it with the lives of those around us, and moves us outward, is one that should be celebrated, with joy, sadness or astonishment (or all three). If I have learned anything at “five,” it is that this interconnectedness of life is one of the most precious things we have, after the love that we hold in our hearts.
I still hold the love that Lee and I had that sad, beautiful last morning five years ago. Those raw, tender moments, at the close of a life together, were the seed of the life that I live today. On those days where I feel ungrounded and adrift, and can’t seem to find my way home, I can use that love to bring myself back to the moment in which I live, and to the love that surrounds me today. I couldn’t ask for a more wonderful connection to the past than that.
]]>Another shot from the afternoon of the previous photo. I loved watching the dudes run down between the dunes…
]]>Death Valley is one of my favorite places on this planet…
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During Hudson’s Death Valley workshop, we were out every morning before dawn and back out until the blue hour. (It was simultaneously exhausting and exhilarating.) On this morning, we woke up at 3 a.m. to go out and catch the rising Milky Way, which was visible for only 30 minutes that day. Hudson did a great job of preparing everyone the evening before, working to get cameras and expectations set for the morning shoot.
After heading out in the van, and hiking out to the Mesquite Dunes, we all lined up and waited for the Milky Way. Hudson had brought along a portable light to illuminate the dunes during our shots, and, although I got a couple of the latter that I liked, this unlit one is my favorite shot of the morning. It violates the cardinal rule that says “thou shalt not put thy subject in the center of the frame,” but to my eye it looks better than some of the off-center shots I made that morning.
I’m still a bit of a newbie on the whole Milky Way thing, but I’ll get there.
]]>I just finished up helping out on a workshop in Death Valley, run by my good friend Hudson Henry. It was a rich and rewarding event, and it recharged my photographic batteries, which have been low for a few months.
I’m less than midway through the culling process of shots from the trip, but today I started in on a bunch of panoramas that I worked on in the Alabama Hills, which Hudson and I visited the day before the workshop began. The image shown here is one of my favorites, and belies the weather conditions at the time, which was cold and stormy to the west and the south of us. (Click on the photo to see it larger in this browser window; right-click this link and choose “Open Image in New Window” to see it at 6,000 pixels wide.) It’s a bit darker here than I’d like, but it speaks to the mood of the day for me.
I know I’ve been more than scarce with the photos posted here over the past year or more; besides the trailer travels, I’ve been working on book publishing projects((Red Notebook Press, my first publishing imprint, released Nan Narboe’s Aging: An Apprenticeship last spring; it did well, but not great, for a variety of reasons. I will say that I learned a lot in the process, and am anxious to apply those lessons to future book projects. (If you’re interested, you can read more about that process in the post, “What I did on my summer vacation“)) and a redo of an older website, Complete Digital Photography (known as CDP around the house). These gigs have kept me quite busy, and I’m pretty much heads down on CDP right now.((I also left Portland, and moved to La Grande, a small college town in eastern Oregon, but that’s a story for another day.))
All that said, the image above is a direct result of one recent project: late last year, through CDP Press, I published Hudson’s Panoramas Made Simple. As part of that book’s editing process, I worked to move from the sloppy, “Rick LePage pano method” to the more accurate—and, frankly, more satisfying—methods that Hudson talks about in the book. When we were out in the Alabama Hills and in Death Valley, I spent a lot of my photographic energy working on panoramic compositions. I have a few more that I’ll get up in the next few weeks, but I thought I’d share this one now, while it was still fresh.
]]>I went down to a friend’s farm to shoot the eclipse the other day, along with Hudson Henry and his eclipse workshop students. We had a blast hanging around all morning, waiting for totality, which was so worth getting up at 4:30 in the morning for.
(I posted this on Instagram and Facebook, but those sites really compress photos, so I decided to repost it here. Click on the photo to see it larger.)
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