My niece Katherine wrote me the other day, out of the blue. I have not seen her in six or eight years, I think. She is my niece by virtue of the fact that she calls me “Auntie” and that her mother, Penny, is like a sister to me; we played racquetball together when she was pregnant with Katherine.

Katherine is now 14, um, 12 years old, and she had an assignment to write about a painting that inspired her. She went to my web site and contacted me from there, saying that the photos were “breathtaking” and made her happy to look at them.

That was wonderful to hear, of course, but I was curious about which photo she’d chosen to write about. A placid landscape? A blossoming flower?

But when she sent me her essay, I was astonished to see that she’d chosen to write about an abstract – one that some people find disturbing or spooky, and others dismiss as meaningless computer-generated garbage.  It was a piece selected for an exhibit last year called “Body and Soul.”

“Essence of Shell: Eyes” is one in a series that I worked on shortly after leaving Afghanistan. My husband and I were recuperating at the beach, and I spent hours photographing the intimate interiors of seashells, then playing with their form and color to pull out the themes I saw in them.

I was wounded, exhausted, and unsure of whether the two years of difficult work had really accomplished what we’d set out to do. I had left Kabul reluctantly, longing to stay with my colleagues and keep up the good fight. These things were in my soul when I made this piece, but I did not consciously set out to tell that story.

Katherine, though, divined the story behind the image without ever having heard it from me. Here is her version.

Of course he had read all those stories of fantasies and wild, conjured dreams from the darkness of the mind, those musings and wonderings and rantings of the philosophical among us.

Of course he had known cheerfully, tramping through foliage and getting soaked and getting bitten by bugs and eating moldy ration bars and running from monsters-but you know, when you were on a Quest like this, it was the end that mattered.

Not the journey.

Right?

…

Right…?

His heart almost seemed to shatter as he remembered tearfully those days when all he had to fear was getting eaten by a Soul Breaker. That was simple.

This was not.

The dark edges of his brain whispered conspiratorially, time will go quickly and don’t you worry, because soon you will be buried without a name or a cross to guard your rotting flesh, like those warriors you see on the side of the road.

Swirls of frenzy stirred him up; was that his fate? He had come to the end of the journey, he was about to win against the monsters…every thought linked to another, and eventually he had come to conclusion that soon, very soon he would leave on another Quest.

But to where?

And without his beloved companions, who now were dearer than life to him now? It seemed incomprehensible, those souls who were so close.

It hurt.

And he was not going to deny it.

Those halcyon times seemed so far away. Romping and laughing and complaining…would that all come to an end? He saw now, that he had been foolish. The pink swirls of joy had all too soon slipped into black curls of venom and bleakness.

It wasn’t the ending that counted, was it?

It was the journey.

]]> http://seeing.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/what-katherine-saw/feed/ 0 Lisa orange443 http://seeing.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/of-contests-books-and-legitimacy/ http://seeing.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/of-contests-books-and-legitimacy/#comments Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:47:01 +0000 Lisa http://seeing.wordpress.com/?p=192 ]]>

Got a letter today that at first made me very happy: My photograph “Rain, From Below” was chosen as a finalist from among 3,000 entries in the 28th Annual Spring Photography Contest of Photographer’s Forum magazine, co-sponsored by Canon.

Rain, From Below - Bali 2007

Then I realized that there must be at least 104 finalists (and I assume, double that number) because next month they will announce the 100 Honorable Mentions and the first through fourth place winners. But still, even if there are 300 finalists, I’m in the top 10 percent. And hey, it was an international competition.

As a finalist, I’ll see my name and photo in their hardcover Best of Photography Annual 2008. That’s nice too – but, I have to pay $55 for a copy of it.

Hmmm…. I could buy some of that really nice Epson fine arts paper for $55. Or a tank of gas to go shooting in southern Georgia. Couldn’t they have given the finalists a free book, or maybe a discount?

But, well, what do you want for a $4-per-photo entry fee?

This letter starts me down the usual no-win debate inside my head about contests in general. I’ve always hated them, never thought they were worth much. I saw great photos and feature stories that didn’t win contests and mediocre photos and stories that did.

I remember all the contests I sat through as a young journalist with my photographer friends. We’d go down to Columbus for the Ohio News Photographer Association judging sessions, which were open, and watch the judges rip through those photos. There were hundreds of photos, and so each image got perhaps a 2-second viewing before being rejected or taken to the next level of judging. It was a good lesson in just how to compose and light a photo that has impact.

In fact I learned a lot about photography from those contests, but moreso from hanging out with some very fine photojournalists. (Ed, Gus, Marcy, Denny, Fred, ….. you know who you are)

One year in particular I remember because a young woman won the portfolio competition for Photographer of the Year. She was still in college, I think, but she’d done an internship in California and came back with some photos that were pretty exotic by Ohio standards – bullfights and such.

The subject matter was dramatic, but her technical skills left much to be desired. Meanwhile, several of the photographers who had never traveled outside of our poor and dying rustbelt corner of the state had very fine portfolios.

That year it was the glamor of California that swayed the judges, and we felt the “real” photographers had been robbed.

To this day, the photographers I respect the most are those who find a great photo no matter how mundane the assignment. Any asshole can take an interesting photo at an exotic location. It takes a really good shooter to pull a great photo from an ordinary situation.

Here are some examples:

2007 Winners ONPA

Ed Suba Jr.’s sports photos

[Watch this space for more examples as soon as I can coax them out of my friends}

My photo, “Orange Needles,” appears in the summer issue of the online literary journal Blood Lotus:

I am pleased that it introduces the Creative Nonfiction section of the journal, which is how I’d categorize my photography, if I had to put it in a literature classification.

The first piece in the section is about how the value of objects changes over time – another theme that I keep returning to.

Anyhow, check it out – there’s some good reading in there, and the cover piece is very nice too.

There’s a new online literary journal, CeLLA’s Round Trip, which happens to have published one of my photos from Dubai. My photo’s called “Street Legal” and it’s on page 34… but page through because there’s plenty of eye candy. (I haven’t read it yet so can’t vouch for the writing…)

And notice the nice, virtual format of issuu.com. It’s a free online magazine publishing service, so if you’ve ever wanted to be a zine publisher, here’s your chance.

In honor of this publication, I put up a special gallery at Baraka Images. This gallery will come down eventually, so check it out now!

Meanwhile, here’s another sample.

(In case you can’t read the sign, it says in Arabic and English, “Celebrate the joy of togetherness – Celebrate shopping!”)

Togetherness, indeed.

I do miss the irony that is Dubai.

I can’t seem to leave Afghanistan… I keep working with those photos, from 2002-05, because the depth of meaning they have for me seems to elude the actual image.

Anyhow, six of them are published today as a photo memoir, “Afghanistan Blues,” in Anderbo.com, a New York online journal whose editor, Rick Rofihe, is an impressively energetic guy. Just talking to him on the phone for a few minutes made me tired. In a good way, of course.

The journal doesn’t do much photography, and also doesn’t do hyperlinks, but otherwise worth a look. Check it out.

The competition was about love, or something like that. It was for women photographers. The gallery – which was in Belgrade – posed meaningful questions about whether women subjugate themselves in love.

I had a series of photos that I’d shot on Coney Island beach, of my sister and her husband. I was laying on the sand shooting up at them, while they were telling stories, and so there’s a kind of comic book effect to the series.

I made a paneled piece called “Circadian Dance,” and another called “How Big Were the Waves.” Essentially I was trying to make the point that relationships are a rhythm, and both sides are trying to get their own personal dramas enacted.

I was not one of the winners.

Colleagues from my former career, the ones who work with words, are not really sure about what I’m doing.

How to explain to them that words betrayed me? That, somewhere among the mis-translations, the cultural Nazi-ism, and the unread reports to headquarters, I became disillusioned with the whole approach to training journalists in developing countries? Not with the journalists themselves – who I miss terribly – but with the system of nonprofits who are more interested in making themselves feel good than in actually improving the skills of their foreign colleagues.

It’s a long story and maybe someday I’ll make a separate blog about it. [See my previous blog, "Last Days First Days," for a taste of my final training assignment, in Timor-Leste.]

Meanwhile, I don’t do words. All my life experience morphs into the dance of camera and eye and hand and light, and this is what I come up with:

Rain, From Below

It was the first large canvas print that I sold in Big Canoe, where I live now. The buyer, who is a designer in New York, saw it in a 16 by 20 and said, “This needs to be BIG.” So I did it as 30 by 40 canvas, and we both loved it. And after reviewing my portfolio, he told me, “This is what you should do. The textures.”

This morning I learned that “Rain, From Below” was a semi-finalist in a photography competition and will be published in the summer issue of the Adirondack Review.

I shot this one morning in Bali after a rain. It’s straight from the camera – no Photoshopping. I was mesmerized by the way that the light glowed through the rain and through the leaf, and took this photo from underneath.

This is what I do.

]]> http://seeing.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/this-is-what-i-do/feed/ 1 Lisa