requiem for an enigma

This is a story about a girl who’s been called an enigma her whole life. And who very much realizes she is one, even to herself.

The truth is that I don’t fit well into any one box. I have already lived multiple lifetimes and most would consider these out of the usual order. Few would guess the things I have lived through, both good and bad. I am always honest, sometimes to a fault, but don’t feel the need to share everything. I don’t consider myself defined by anything external, and therefore I float easily between worlds and have a very diverse group of friends. I feel I belong everywhere and nowhere.

I was a child who grew up in her own head because I felt dissonance between the world I was born to and who I was. I was not affirmed, so I learned to affirm myself. I conformed to certain things in order to feel safe but inwardly I stoked a hotbed of rebellion. I questioned everything, believed in everything and nothing. I was a risk taker and somewhat reckless. I still am. I ran outside in thunderstorms and tornados to experience their power and dared God to strike me down. I was in two major car accidents but I still drive much too fast. I learn from experience, and yet even after being burned I will take the same risks over and over. I am probably one of the most resilient people you will meet. Some might say headstrong.

I love power when it is used for good, but I dislike the spotlight; I prefer subtle influence. I am a passionate and sensual person, and highly attuned to my own body. When I love, I love with complete abandon. I open up slowly, layer by layer, but try to force me open and I flee. I only ever give what I want to give, and I expect no more from anyone else. By the same token, I consider my greatest gift my intuition, and I likely know a lot more about you than you think I do.

I’m fierce and exacting about what I want from myself and my work. I’m obsessed with quality because I care deeply that people have a good experience. I look up to no one and down on no one. I love human beings and I want to understand them. I crave depth. I ask questions of everyone because I need to make sense of the stories I see around me. Everyday life plays out to me like a movie, and every person and thing an interesting and complex character I want to know beneath their layers. I try to discover the soul in everything I see, no matter whether it’s a rock or a person. Photography has been a way for me to do this.

I am a deeply spiritual person. I believe in God, and I have felt flooded with his/her presence in a Catholic cathedral just as well as in the Costa Rican jungle. I do not hold to any particular religion because none of them seem either wrong or right to me. I believe in the idea of reincarnation, in the rebirth of souls for the purpose of growth and becoming, and many of my beliefs relate to different pieces of different religions. I dread people asking me certain questions, like: what is your faith? What is your political persuasion? What’s your favorite this or that? Because these questions I can’t answer. I have no favorites. I have very many things I love and appreciate equally. I put things together and create my own version, but I enjoy entertaining other viewpoints and find validity in many that do not look like my own.

I love to dress up. I have owned fabulous dresses that I never had occasion to wear. And yet I feel equally myself in sweats and a baseball cap. I am comfortable in many different hats. I know how to hunt and clean a deer and I also know how to mingle at a fancy party. I enjoy both equally.

I am descended from both a notorious pirate and an English queen. I also come from peasants who kept warm in the winter by sitting in cow dung. I am fascinated by all cultures and I want to absorb them, eat them, wear them on my body. I don’t want to just travel and see places. I want to become everywhere I go. I am sometimes frustrated that the color of my skin, or the language I speak prevent me from completely fitting in. I feel a constant need to experience the full spectrum of human existence. This makes me always very restless.

My only fear is one I already know will come true, and that is reaching the end of my life and not having lived all of the lifetimes I believe I was meant to live. I don’t know if I will ever score that film, or write that book, or be an infamous spy, or dig up buried treasure. But I have such an ache inside of me to be so many things, to do so much more than I think I will ever have the capacity to do.

neptune

It's fascinating to me how some art can slice straight through all of my layers and hit me straight in the heart. Like an arrow shot skillfully through a very narrow opening, it completely misses all of my evaluative processing, so that I don't really judge what it is about it that makes it good. My first reaction is only to feel something.

I wrote on my blog years ago that my best pictures were made in a moment when my heart broke. I believe some of the best art is made when the artist is broken in making the work - not only in terms of sadness or grief, but when the beauty so overwhelms them that they create from the most vulnerable place, the inner child.

Merriam-Webster uses words like subdued and interrupted to define brokenness. I saw an interview with John Frusciante some time ago, where he talked about how art already exists outside of us - that we don't "create" art, but rather we are a channel through which the art seeks to finds expression. If this is true, then art does require our brokenness. We construct the adult we want to be to protect the child we are inside, but it is often that very adult in us who judges and criticizes, who overthinks, rationalizes and creates fear. This is what needs to be subdued for the inner child to have the courage to bring the art to life. 

Perhaps this same process of brokenness is what allows us to feel art deeply - even art that we might otherwise dismiss. Jeanette Winterson wrote about this in her essay Art Objects: "When you say 'This work has nothing to do with me,' 'This work is boring/pointless/silly/obscure/élitist etc.,' you might be right, because you are looking at a fad, or you might be wrong because the work falls so outside of the safety of your own experience that in order to keep your own world intact, you must deny the other world of the painting. This denial of imaginative experience happens at a deeper level than our affirmation of our daily world. Every day, in countless ways, you and I convince ourselves about ourselves. True art, when it happens to us, challenges the 'I' that we are."

It takes courage not only to make art, but to let it in.

“A writer’s heart, a poet’s heart, an artist’s heart, a musician’s heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world.”

— Alice Walker

yin x yang

I believe in the principle of yin and yang - that all things have a counterbalance and a complement. Yin and yang might seem contradictory individually, but when the right two come together, they form perfect harmony. They emphasize the individuality and the other-ness of their counterpart. They neither take anything away nor add to the other, yet the marriage of the two creates something beautiful and profound.

For me as an artist, and being so focused on color, this concept carries into my work as well. Every color has an opposite that is very different, but complementary. And every photograph that speaks to me is a yin waiting for its yang. Many times its match is not always the obvious, it’s more based on feeling.

My photograph Conception (below left) has always been my personal favorite photo. This was the first photo I exhibited (at the UNICEF art show in LA). It was shot in the winter of 2016 during my 365 project and it represents, to me, birth, the womb, a journey. When I look at it I feel as though I’m moving towards the beginning of life, and this mysterious light is the entry point.

This summer I was traveling to the airport into the sunset, and the sky lit up with the most glorious light display. It moved me so much that I pulled my car off the highway and took a photo (luckily I had my camera with me). The resulting image on the right is the yang to my yin. It’s called Consummation and it’s about the beauty of endings. I look at it and I see a celebration of completion. So often we feel the need to think of what’s beyond an ending (like the afterlife when a loved one dies, or hope after a relationship dissolves). But an ending in itself is beautiful.

These two photos will forever be paired in my mind - yin and yang, beginning and end, winter the summer, cold and warmth, darkness and light, Conception and Consummation.

a thank you to the leica m9

Today is the 10th anniversary of the Leica M9, my digital camera of choice for the last almost-6 years (January 2014). I got a little nostalgic today thinking about the many places it’s been with me and what it’s seen. I have shot about 13,000 images with my M9. I found my perfect lens (the Summilux 50mm 1.4) which I never took off again. I documented every single day of my life with it in 2016 during my 365 project. My M9 captured the portraits of strangers and loved ones, it chronicled beginnings and endings. It came with me hiking in the wilderness, and walked the streets with me of the world’s largest cities. I experimented with all sorts of light, subject matter, and editing styles until I found what made it sing to me. It braved hurricanes and blizzards, it traveled through countless x ray machines and was thrown into tote bags and handbags and many different camera bags. It fell off a chair once and crashed on a tile floor - I have a dent in my lens hood to prove it. I cursed at the write speeds, and I cried over the sensor replacement because I was so afraid it would lose its soul (it didn’t).

No other camera can render light and color like the M9 if you shoot it the way it likes to be shot. But it requires a lot of persistence to understand what it likes. You have to treat it like a being with its own mind. If your minds match, it can be a magical partnership.

This camera has been my sidekick as I journeyed to find my artistic voice in photography. It was the camera that was with me when I disconnected from “likes” and found the only “like” that mattered was my own. It’s not only given me the best images I’ve ever made, it’s become an indelible part of how I see. How my M9 translates the world is the language I’ve come to speak with my pictures. The soul of this camera has become a mirror of my own.

truth

Many of us live our lives very publicly in today’s world. The internet and social media have made it possible for us to share our everyday thoughts, feelings, spaces, opinions, relationships and decisions with complete strangers. As time goes on I see this as more and more of a danger; part of the truth may be left in the shadows. In that respect we only really know half (at best) of someone’s story, and so often we judge what we read or see on the surface without truly understanding.

Assume the compassionate view of others, if in doubt. Every one of us is trying our best, and light and darkness are both part of our stories.

observations

Photography has been a gift to my life in so many ways. One of the things I am most thankful for is how it makes me more present. Through the practice of photography, eyes become keen observers. I notice the way the light touches everything, how it transforms the colors of the sky and the grass and the water. I see patterns and textures. In my head even the most mundane of scenes has a story to tell, and this hopefully finds its way into my pictures and into the hearts of others.