In The Midst

In 2004 my friend, and employer, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her office manager and I continued our daily jobs in the office which was located on the top floor of the house. During the time of her chemotherapy, I had no thoughts of photographing her intense journey, but for one day, when she came upstairs, dressed to go to go somewhere special. Her dog, Curious, was laying down in the office when she arrived, and immediately jumped up to greet her. Shari lowered her shaved head as she bent over to hug him. Instinctually I reached for the camera in my bag and asking her to not move, capturing the moment. Later, I converted it to black and white and with Photoshop took out the messy distractions of the office wall, replacing it with a painterly plain backround. A few months later, when Shari returned from her first radiation follow up appointment and showed us the marks made on her chest to be used in the treatment, I asked if she was interested and willing to allow me to document what this was about. At that moment we did the first of the series that continued for a month or so......the checkered shirt image. Most photos, of which there were not too many, were done spontaneously, but for a set up photo shoot we did in the living room of her nude. I have included only the one from the back, out of respect for her privacy on the internet.

Later year I entered 3 of the images, including the one with the dog, and the checkered shirt into the NC Biennial Phototography Juried Competition and won Best of Show with this series entitled "In the Midst."

Happily, Shari recovered her energy and health and is living her life normally. Interestingly, a few years after the ordeal, she told me that she was grateful we did the photos during that time in her life; that they are the only reference she has to that period; while she lived it, she said, everything was a blur.

The reason I'm thinking about these images and posting some of them now, is that a few months ago I entered a competition for women photographers world wide, The Julia W. Cameron Awards, having entered the photo of Shari and the dog, and just received notice that I am a finalist. News of winners will be awhile, but I'm really happy that this photo has been again recognized.

What??!!

Leafing through Los Angeles Magazine a few weeks ago, I came upon this ad.....now I know what they were going for; that's obvious.....but what comes across on the page made my stomach lurch and my breath gasp....What the hell were they thinking? Are we as a society so numb and jaded that a scene like this doesn't conjure up death and destruction at the most primal level....setting off the kind of horror that is a terrorist's most glorious dream?

I worked around the advertising community for years. I know an ad at this level involved many people with many decisions being gone over and over. "They" were happy with the photo....This image was signed off on, for God's sake. I understand the sweetness of the concept of the kid's exhausted after an obviously raucus birthday party, but something went awry..... Studying the composition, to me the tipping point is the child in the pink dress' posture in the foreground. It changes everything. I assume, from being on many shoots, there were probably other images with different variations, but using all those children, you don't have a lot of time for many variations of poses, even with massive photoshop intervention. But this is the frame that was chosen.

This was not the work of some fine art photographer tolling away in the darkest region of his soul.....how did this get into print to sell furniture?

Just asking and shaking my head in disbelief....but then, maybe I'm too sensitive, and a cigar is sometimes just a cigar?

What do you think of this?

Night Again

There's a writer, Michael Ventura, who had a column entitled "Letters at 3am." published in the LA Weekly that I followed for the many years I lived in the city of angels. I mention it because he crossed my mind very early this morning after tossing in bed riding tears into the depths of uncomfortable emotions....not sure quite what set it off...well yes I do, but am not goin' public. Just to say there I was, spinning out. Then, as the ride began to subside somewhere around 2am or so, I flashed on Ventura.... how his creative writing often arose from or at least spoke of deep uncomfortable places, often arriving poetically at the epiphany of understanding or awareness.

Feeling exhausted, oddly energized but wordless in the darkness, I looked again toward the wall of windows that I suddenly realized had provided a visual landing strip for my mind each time it took off like a leaf in the wind of autumn. I recognized the shadows on the shades were visual mantras. They pulled me to them, alternately soothing my agitation and urging me on to allow the exploration into this chapter of darkness.... to proceed into the eye of the hurricane, so to speak.

Feeling gratitude toward the beauty of the shadows on these screens, I set up my tripod and camera to pay homage to what I recognized to be a source for meditation visualization.

Om Shanti - Peace

Oh, Deer...

This whole deer image thing began last summer when I went up to Pennsylvania to shoot some night images based on two places I lived....one as a child, and when an adult, a house in a potato farming community. While at the farm house, as I looked through the house as it was now, a new family living there, of course, the den sported a stuffed deer head on the wall. I photographed it during the daylight, and much later, when back home, I combined the image with one of me shot outside, also in the daylight, peeking from behind a barn door, and created what is known as a "day for night" image.

I didn't think much about deer again until just a few months ago when my new neighbor invited me to his house and there on the floor, awaiting their place on the wall, were two stuffed deer heads.....I'm not a hunter, nor do I find the idea of decorating with taxidermy, but over the years, deer have come to me in meditations occasionally, leading me to understand that they are my animal guides, or totems. If you want to read more about the deer as a totem you can click http://blueapples.ca/articles/animal-totem/deer/ to read about it.

So anyway, I got a visceral rush looking at them as well as being very uncomfortable knowing they were dead, but really wanted to photograph them. I called my photog friend in Richmond about what I found, and how I wanted to photograph them..... he wanted to come up and help out with the lighting.... (Thank you, Richard.)

Trapped Spirits - Part 2

Art, by it’s nature examines, challenges, reflects, informs, imagines.

We attempt to change society/culture with poetics…..shifting the mind of the viewer to crack open the shell of preconceived notions, complacency…Art attempts to present ways of shifting perceptions, even for a moment, into a new way of seeing or understanding.

My photographic explorations mainly touch on confronting that which is concealed, hidden, masked. I’m of the belief that only by knowing our deepest intrinsic nature, our essential Self, can we cut through the illusions of our world with all that it brings with it.

I believe objects are imbued with an intrinsic vibration/energy when created and it is amplified over time by interaction with people or environments . Dolls and figurines that are associated with human forms are perfect totems or talisman that often reverberate with energy absorbed or infused by being played with, or being placed for a period of time on a shelf or table in a room of a home.

Sometimes love and feelings of nurture and positive power of healing emanate from objects….and sometimes fears and pain are trapped within. By observing that which is uncomfortable within ourselves we have the opportunity acknowledge that darkness and dispel it with the light of understanding.

Trapped Spirits - Part 1

While roaming around in an antique/vintage market place in Greensboro, NC a few years ago, I occasionally noticed among the bric-a-brack stuff a doll or figurine catching my attention because of some odd or weird vibe that seemed eminate from within it. Obviously, the form and/or face objectified the sense of weirdness, but the energy of the form was heightened. Having my camera with me I began to shoot photographs of them; at home later, they got filed and put away in the hard drive and that was that. The next time I was down there again, a year later, I noticed a few more odd dolls and juxtapositions of them, so recorded them as well.

Fast forward to one of the local Art Walk Fridays a few months ago. I was in a crappy state of mind when wandering in an out of lord knows how many galleries and studio spaces that night, and got really cranky and judgemental with thoughts of how nothing was holding my attention long enough to even warrant stopping in front of what was on the wall....anywhere. Bored to distraction but for some good cheese I found to eat at one gallery, I left for home, grumbling and muttering to myself, "am I so numb nothing is getting through, or was the art as bland as it seemed to me?" I can be a total art snob ass, so it's hard to say.....and certainly I haven't changed the world of art history with anything I've done, but that's the way it went down.

When I got home, I thought about the creepy dolls in my hard drive, and driven by vitriol (is that the word?) I brought them out and feverishly started working on them long into the night, figuring, at least if you saw one of these fuckers blown up large peering out from up on a wall, it would make you stop and feel something, at least for a moment. I certainly know this idea of images isn't new, and shock factor is a cheap shot, but oddly, over the last few months, it's come to me that this body of images actually follow quite closely the night photographs of "Lifting the Veil of Night" that I've been doing for probably four years now.

It's all about concealment.

I'll get all talky about that in the next post.....for now, here are some of the "Trapped Spirits" that are gonna be blown up 24"x36" big on Kinko paper and t-pinned to the wall of Points of View Gallery in Raleigh some time in April.

EMBODIMENT-An Exhibit

These are the images that are being exhibited in this show.....all of the black and whites were scanned from negative film shot over the past 20 or so years.

Mannequin & Mask


Fear of Commitment


Death Walks Among Us


Mortality Dance


Bird Mask


Camillia & Mask



The Sage/Papper Hand Puppets