This is what I do

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.