Summer’s Winter

One of the unexpected perks of being a photographer who often shoots in natural settings is that I have been able to witness some examples of incredible beauty and wonder that I never would have seen if I wasn’t out in it so frequently.  One example of this is the sudden winter that fell over a nearby forest in the middle of summer.  The forest is rich with a certain kind of tree which apparently reproduces in much the same way a dandelions does; growing a downy, fluffy seed which the wind carries far and wide.  I have searched and searched, but I still have no idea what the name of the tree is; if you know, please tell me!  Regardless, the result of the trees was that huge sections of the forest was covered in a magical “snow.”  I couldn’t have asked for a setting more perfect for DreamWorld.

Naturally, I leaped into photographic action.

The first photo of the series featured Dedeker amidst the snow trees.  She carried such a feeling of wonder and awe, much the same as I had felt the first time I saw the snowy landscape.

All Of Winter In A Day

All Of Winter In A Day – detail

All Of Winter In A Day – detail

All Of Winter In A Day – detail

The second photo I created was with Katie.  I decided there should be someone who ruled this forever-winter corner of DreamWorld, a benevolent being who would keep things always winter, but it would be a spring-like winter full of life and growth.  I’m sure a lot of my fascination with this idea has to do with the brutal Los Angeles summer we all go through every year, and the fact that heat makes all of my symptoms much worse.  I dread summer every year, and I long for a place where summer could never reach, so the Snow Saint was created.  I wanted her to have a semi-religious quality, something that hinted at a spirituality as well as power over nature.  Katie easily embodied all of these elements at once.  The Snow Saint looks like a queen, like someone to be revered, but also someone you could approach and who would hear your supplications.

Where Summer Dares Not Tread – detail

Where Summer Dares Not Tread – detail

Where Summer Dares Not Tread – detail

And yes, on both occasions my models and I were shaking “snow” off our clothes and out of our hair for hours, but it was well worth it 🙂

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To The Lost Fundraiser

As a continuation of my last post, this one will also be talking about Andrew Ashcraft, the boy I played with when I was young who grew up to be one of the fallen Hotshot heroes from Arizona’s recent fires.

I created a photo to work through my grief, as I often do, but it didn’t feel like enough.  I kept thinking about Andrew’s poor widow, left with their four very young children to raise, all on her own.  And then I’d think about the families of the 18 other firefighters and how would they get by, and I had to do something.

So, 75% of all profits made from any sales of To The Lost will go to directly to the families through the donation program set up.  This applied to anything and everything To The Lost appears on.  I have, of course, my extremely beautiful and archival fine art prints, and also blank cards, stickers, clothing, Ipod, Iphone and Ipad cases.

There are 19 families left without fathers, husbands, providers.  The last thing they need while they’re still reeling from the profound loss is to worry about how the bills are going to get paid.  Let’s give them some of the aid they need.

To The Lost

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To The Lost

It was last Tuesday, July 2nd, that I found out about the tragic deaths of the nineteen firefighters in Arizona a few days earlier.  At the same time, I discovered my childhood friend, Andrew Ashcraft, was one of those lost.  It took a while to sink in.  Andrew, who I had played with for years, was gone.

Not only Andrew, but eighteen others of Arizona’s finest firefighters were lost.   They were called the Granite Mountain Hotshot crew; essentially the Navy Seals of the fire world.  They were trained to go into the deadliest, most dire situations and kick the fire’s ass.  They went in to make a fuel break for the devastating forest fire when the wind changed and trapped them.  There was no escape.

My heart breaks for Andrew’s widow, left to raise their four very young children, the oldest of whom is merely six, by herself.  It breaks for Andrew’s mother Deborah, who has to bury one of her children.  It breaks for the eighteen others families in the same situation.

Andrew with his family

Andrew was only 29.  He had been named the 2011 Rookie of the Year in the Hotshot crew.  He’d had to really work to get into the crew.   That was what he wanted to do.  He chose to be the best, bravest, most worthy of men.  I am in awe.

It’s important for me to state that it had been a long time since I’d seen Andrew… I was probably 13 or so.  But he and his brother TJ were a big part of my childhood.   Our moms were friends and would frequently trade babysitting, so for years my brother and I saw and played with the Ashcraft boys several times a week.  My brother was the oldest of us, TJ was next, then me and Andrew was the youngest, even though only four years separated us all.  It was just enough of an age difference that the older two boys would want to go off and do Secret Older Boy Things together (mostly involving GI Joes, as I recall) so Andrew and I were often our own group… which sometimes consisted merely of sulking about being left out of Secret Boy Things.  But we made our own fun.

I can’t find a photo of the four of us together, but here’s a photo of myself (in front), TJ and my brother in some strange church play.

One of the clearest memories I have of the four of us is arguing heatedly over who played which character when we would play Batman.  My brother, the oldest, was naturally Batman.  When he and I played it at home, I was Robin, and I felt that was my part.  But TJ’s slight age difference made a good argument in the logic of children for him assuming the role of Robin.  The debate was settled when we found out about Batgirl, who I would obviously play, leaving Robin to TJ.  But poor Andrew was always forced to play Alfred or some random henchmen; he never got to play a really good character.  I had laughingly told this story to Geoff quite a while ago, not realizing the irony that was to come.

Andrew grew up to be a real, living, actual hero.  He lived his heroism more than any person I know of.  He went out doing what he loved, with the men he loved, and if he ever felt fear, he never let it stop him.  I am so sad his family has lost him.  I am sad that the world has lost such an amazing person.  And I am sad that I never got to know Andrew at this age, that we lost touch, and I only discovered what an incredible person he was second hand.  The world is nineteen wonderful souls poorer.

As I cried into Geoff’s chest the day I heard the news, one of the first things he asked was how I was going to work through my feelings photographically.  This is just one of the many reasons I love him, because I was already mentally hard at work trying out different concepts and trying to figure it out.  As I was working through my grief and trying to put my feelings into a visual form, I was also talking a lot with Katie, who had recently experienced a similar kind of loss.  It was a great comfort to have her and other people in my life familiar with grief to talk to.  Katie and I already had a shoot planned in a few days, so I told her to just expect that we would shoot something to honor Andrew and the other firefighters.

This was another shoot done on a non-budget.  It took just a few big, yellow smoke bombs and the fresh flowers.  Also, HUGE thanks to Geoff for being my human shutter release!

Usually I edit things in order of them being shot, as that seems fairest, but this got bumped way up in line.  I really wanted it to be released today, the day of the big memorial service in Prescott.  You’ll see that Katie is playing the role of the rescuer, pulling me to safety, but not far from the danger herself.  The smoke wrapping around my body and throat actually happened exactly like that, straight out of camera, and seems to want to pull me back and not let go.  Katie is carrying nineteen large orange, yellow and red flowers, symbolizing the fallen heroes, and I like that there are smaller yellow flowers connected to the stalks; they seem to symbolize the fireman’s family.

When I searched for a title for this photo, I immediately remembered what Jimmy in Boardwalk Empire says before each drink instead of the standard “cheers” or “bottom’s up;” he says “to the lost.”  For Jimmy it was about his lost comrades during the war, but it seemed to fit here perfectly.  This is also only the second time I’ve ever done a square crop on a photo.  For the most part I stick very strictly to my 2×3 ratio.  This photo just called for something else, so I went with it.  There are some detail shots of the photo below.

I hope Andrew’s family heals as quickly as it can, along with the rest of the families.  There is nothing I can say or do that can make it better for them.  How I wish there was.  All I can do is try to honor the fallen heroes, with my words, my photos, and my many, many tears.

Andrew was a badass… but the very best kind, who hasn’t lost his softer side.  He was a true hero, like Prince Lir.  We didn’t know that Andrew was the biggest hero of us all.

He should have been Batman.

You can donate directly to Andrew’s family here.

To The Lost

To The Lost – detail

To The Lost – detail

To The Lost – detail

To The Lost – detail

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The Walter White Effect

It was brought up in a recent interview I did that I am pursuing my art career somewhat “aggressively,” as the interviewer said.  Which is not a negative thing, he was just surprised by the intensity with which I am trying to bring my visions to life, and also make art my full-time career.  And while I hadn’t thought too much consciously before he asked me about it, I know why I’m like that.  For one thing, I rarely pursue anything halfheartedly; I’m either all in and completely obsessed or not in at all.  That’s just part of me being me.

But there is another cause, which I’m calling the Walter White Effect.

Someone put these two screen captures together which is so handy for this post!

Walter White, from the AMC show Breaking Bad… he begins the pilot episode as a repressed, quiet, brilliant but afraid, somewhat henpecked, overqualified high school chemistry teacher.  He and his wife have a surprise baby on the way and a teenage son with cerebral palsy.  To supplement his family’s meager income, he has a second job a a car wash, which he truly hates.  Then he’s told he has cancer and his prognosis is not good.  His internal clock immediately starts ticking.  He looks around at his life, his family and realizes he will have almost nothing to leave them with if he dies.  So he jumps into action.  He begins making meth as a way to quickly make a lot of money to secure his family’s future.  I’m not spoiling anything here, this is all set up in the first episode.  Where his journey takes him is another matter, and is very, very worth watching for yourself.  I, for one,  am counting he days until we get to see the final episodes of the show.

Now, my plight is nowhere near as desperate as Walter’s is, and a show about my life would be incredibly boring to watch.  It would be mostly watching me spend hours and hours and hours editing photos in my pajamas, sprinkled with taking pills, doctor’s appointments, letting Calantha in and out and watering the flowers.  No one wants to see that.  My internal clock is not as loud or desperate as his, but I do hear it ticking away.  There’s no reason to expect that I will get sicker from the ME… but there’s no evidence that I won’t, either.  There is just so little really known about it.  So I do feel a self-imposed pressure to make as much art as I can while I have the ability to, to further my career as much as I can now so that it might support me when other means of work are no longer options.

We finally have our first official death listed as ME on record.  Poor Sophie; I’m sorry that she had to be the one to break this ground.  No one really knows how many of us die from ME, since we’ve had such a hard time just getting validation  about our illness being real.  From speaking with doctors, and what I’ve found out from my own research, we rarely die directly from ME, but it plays a heavy hand in things… organ failure as a result of taking pain meds for decades to combat the ME-caused pain, as an example.

Let me be clear, I do not expect to die soon, and I also don’t expect to get suddenly much sicker and be unable to create.  The future is wide open, and I need to embrace it.  But I also have to keep in mind possible changes and try to be prepared for them without giving in to them.  That’s another thing I can learn from Walter White.  He never threw his hands up and decided he was just going to wait for the cancer to consume him.  He fought it with every part of his being.

This photo made me laugh, but it does illustrate what I’m trying to say.  The future is cloudy.  No one knows what will happen.  But it’s wise to try and fight against, and prepare for, possible negative outcomes.

So fuck it, I’m making art.

I would deeply appreciate any of you taking a moment to sign this petition to change the name CFS to ME.  It’s greatly needed, so a huge thank you to anyone who signs it!

All Hail The Queen – my Breaking Bad-inspired self portrait

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