Into the light.

December 30, 2015, Caddo Mills (Texas.)

Mostly I worry about money, like an undercurrent I can’t fight.
Yet the deep river of my worries is tinged with light.
Isn’t it the light you see first, out of the shadows in the image drawing your gaze, making you want to smile?
I had to add up the sum of what I earned this year to reapply for health insurance, and it was a sobering and depressing endeavor, topped only by looking at the list of my photography clients.
Building a business takes time, my friends tell me, especially a photo business. Ideally it is done with the backing of a spouse who provides the earnings and the support, moral as well as material, while the investments, the bills and the worries pile up. Here I am, and there may not be a worse way to start a business than the one I went about this year, emotionally bankrupt, financially strained, physically drained. Not surprisingly it’s not working, at least not yet, by far.
So I worry about money. I worry about ever earning enough again to be independent, to raise my kids solo and not have to ask anybody anything, to walk proud, to walk light and beautiful. Then come the holidays and the holidays are hard, there is nothing worse than the holidays, and trying to make the memories sweet and happy for the kids, trying to be a presence of joy and lightheartedness, and his presence/absence in our lives so difficult to bear, and that it’s all ending soon and it’s a relief and it’s so scary.
But I will be strong and I will be joy and with each with one of my breath I will bring my kids light and beauty and laughter no matter what scorching winds the fear rides, and I will defeat it with each act of creation and each act of love and they are the same and it is on the wings of their winds that the world is born into its perfection every moment everywhere.

Gratitude.

December 13, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

It is raining and warm outside, and the house is full of colors, the walls red, turquoise blue, bright yellow, the boys’ eyes.
The past week has brought me recognition beyond my expectations and again the love of friends and family pouring in from all over the world, keeping all those colors screaming.
Daily living is still a stressful race against the clock with two kids’ lives I strive to keep as alive and joyful and full of soul-opening opportunities as I can, and three jobs I try to juggle, but I am finally making friends, thanks to a part-time job started this summer at a French-Spanish immersion school, French friends, Puerto Rican friends, American friends, the way I like it, my rainbow of life, the screaming colors, wide open and crazy my life and our friends and the door to my house. Even when it is cold outside I can’t bear to close the front door, leave it open I say, I need the light, the door to the motor home when we were a circus family wide open and my spouse complaining about the cold or the wind or the heat but I would reopen it the instant he was gone, and at the house here it is open wide, because I want to see outside and bring in the light, because I want to see outside and bring in the world.
But I’m lost in my words again and all I wanted to say was that in the maelstrom of our lives I am so happy, and I got to shoot a senior portrait yesterday, too, and giving tribute to that almost grown man’s face was a fitting culmination of my week’s gratitude.

Images in my head.

November 29, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

Through our shooting star and into the light we fly, grateful for all the joy in our lives.
It’s been a trying two weeks. Walking through hell and back on the wings of a few words, yes but pausing to give thanks, too, and that act of will redeeming.
And there was my birthday, and the pearl of messages from friends around the country and around the world on social media was a sweet reminder of my wandering life. It was a reminder of the power of the word. Words against the flow of images from all these years that have become unbearable to see for they remind me a little too much of death. Against the flow my friends’ thoughts dissolving the images away, images that I made and that made me, all those images now no more than a fool’s folly, not my truth, not anybody’s truth, just images willed out of what is now my history.
It has been a strange two weeks.
Dylan turned ten.
I remember turning ten, one of very few childhood memories, and the cake on the table in the large living room of that sixties-styled house in the South of France my father designed, the large living room my father wanted painted bright orange-red, the fireplace in the far corner, all concrete and consuming wood, the table with the cake my mother made and my family there and Paul and Hélène, my parents’ artist friends who lived down the street and were my grandparents growing up because my real grandparents were either dead or nonexistent, a cake and a present and two close friends, and it is all I needed, and that is all I need. I remember thinking getting two digits for sure meant the world belonged to me, I had finally attained the right to step onto the springboard to real life.
Remembering is all I seem to do these days, my circus life long gone but my present full of its trails, bits of nails left on the floor, the dust there.
It has been a long two weeks, a presence an absence an unflinching reality, and my history in pictures dancing in front of my eyes in his eyes.
It has been a strange two weeks, and I am exhausted but at peace in my world of mirrors.

My country bleeds.

November 15, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

My country bleeds, and in the small closed kingdom of my heart I bleed, and all I can write about today is a world of hurt.
My country bleeds, my family is well but all know of someone who is not, who was there, the daughter of a friend of my mother, in the restaurant where one of the attacks happened, she is safe but the friend next to her is dead, my country bleeds and we all bleed, the daughter of another friend in the Bataclan that night, and I bleed and I want to cry Why? but I know why, and there is hard part, scores of disenfranchised second-generation immigrant youth left in the ditch of French society for decades and ready for the brainwashing of groups like the Islamic State, an immense collective mess-up turned international tragedy, and I try but can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, nor at the end of my own inconsequential intimate world of pain.
My country bleeds.
I bleed.
It is a reflection of the beauty of my life so far that I have no pictures to express that, but this one taken from a dance production.
I think of James Nachtwey’s picture of a child crying in a Romanian orphanage, the one that reminds me of the famous painting called The Cry by Edvard Munch.

Roaring at life, we are.

November 8, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

I feel like roaring.
One of those days. One of these weeks.
As my friend and newspaper photographer extraordinaire Denny Simmons said, I “got some love” this week and it felt so good. Excerpts from my very personal and now painfully personal project, The Mudshow Diaries, were featured in a major publication and the thanks I need to extend are endless, even as the bitter-sweet reality of this part of my life being closed are still slowly sipping through my psyche trailing their infinite thread of loss pearls.
But there I go again, waxing sad and melancholy when what this week brought me was sheer raucous joy and not just from my peers and the photo industry but from my two little grains of life, new haircuts and same old ways, just as hard and just as great it is raising them, roaring with laughter and dancing loudly one day and grinding teeth the next, and professional success or not this won’t change a bit, my friends.
But today I do feel like roaring still and it does feel good, simply.

Much ado and no photography.

October 30, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

Big eyes. Brown. My child’s eyes. Yes this child I wanted and he is here, and he is all. The days are his and all I can do is stare back in awe and silly happiness and go on with the days’ labors.
A week of big eyes staring at me in love and anger and frustration, in love and glee, Nicolas in the dentist’s chair with sunglasses on the size of his whole face, saying I’m flying! as the chair goes up and up, and I just joy. Dylan smoothing the lines on my forehead tonight as I kissed him good night and saying, Mom, I can tell you laughed a lot in your life. Yes and it’s all thanks to you my love.
Big brown eyes my brown-eyed boys, honey-dew skin that turns deep dark chestnut in the long summer days, skinny legs and long long fingers, the first thing I noticed when Nicolas was born were his fingers, how incredibly long, and Dylan will be ten years old in two weeks and I remember the impression of his feet the midwives that helped him into the world made and I want to make new ones, out of glee and joy and silly happiness.
So there were the joys and there was gymnastics, and it was my turn to carpool but the car keeps draining coolant and heating up exactly on Thursdays, the days we alternate carpooling, and there was swimming and I couldn’t join the boys in the water as I’ve started to do this fall to build up my dismal endurance, a lifetime of no exercise catching up with me, a lifetime and ten years of child rearing almost solo and no time to shower much less go to the gym all catching up with me, and there was a slew of doctor’s appointments, mine and the kids’, and cold weather finally settling down on us and there are the winter clothes to dig up and the summer’s memories to tuck away, and the week is over and I haven’t as much as taken one picture, not even with my phone, of the big brown eyes looking back at me and oh, how I’m flying high.

Illusions.

October 24, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

Today I am taking pictures of a friend’s family. It is one of the hardest things to do for me, to take pictures of a child, someone, anyone who is life itself for someone else and translate that love in an image. Sometimes those images are going to be all we have left of a loved one.
It is a false pretense, that defiance of death through photography. What hubris! My brother looking at the camera with a thin air of defiance on his lips, and the cigarette between his fingers. He’s been dead more than twenty years and the image is all I have and nothing like what he was. An image will never be more than a shadow, pure creation.
After taking family pictures, or pictures of children, I always feel that I failed, failed dismally, in that creative endeavor. The problem is there is always something else I could have done, something I could have done differently; as in any art form the variations are maddeningly infinite by nature.
Infinite too, the mistakes you feel you make when raising a child by yourself, infinite the headaches and the worrying. My youngest a tangle of nerves and pent-up emotions these days, draining me in the wake of his exuberant rebellions, sweet as can be and determined but fragile, like thin crystal, and that thin membrane I see like a reflection of myself in him and I want to spare him the mistakes, emotions rolling in and out like destructive waves, it’s ok, my love my life, and later it will all be forgotten like finger drawings in the sand.
Images like finger drawings in the sand.
That picture of you an illusion we have become so eager to think as reality.

Time.

October 17, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

My little one was sick this week.
Here he is, flying high at the circus, with his Dad and big brother, laughing, barely two years old, and that is one of my favorite pictures of him, even though you can hardly see him you feel him laughing flying, time suspended in joy.
Time.
This week he came ill, my little one because he will always be my little one, the youngest, a fever, gone as it came, unfathomable, random, as illnesses will be, and the anguish of being helpless, mostly, in the face of it.
This wasn’t anything serious, just the stuff of daily life raising children. This wasn’t anything to write about. Nothing much and I think of all of us in our vulnerability, of all the ones who are sick, dying, young and old, the unfairness and the agony, our cries. I think of the swan in Baudelaire’s poem of the same name I read again last week with a friend, the great white swan lost on dusty cobblestones looking in vain for water, crying to the sky, imploring God, “that great swan in its torment,” like “those who lose what never can be found again - never!”
And there it is: photography my shield against the passing of time, the passing of everything I love, and ultimately, because time passing is just that, against death. My fragile wall against the abyss, my daily struggle to hold on to what can never be found again. I take pictures to hold on to what I love but is already gone, to keep what is lovely and fair and can never be found again, to keep the trace of it, only a moment.
As far as I can remember I have had the feeling that time was running out, running running, our lives always against the clock and it is too late, and there I found in photography the only way I could deal with it, and with the oblivion that will come.
Nicolas felt better and went back to school, and I went back to my part-time job at a language immersion school, and the rest of our lives resumed.
In those two days I stayed home with him I had time to finish post-production work on a client’s pictures.
Time.

No words.

October 10, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

How do you bury love?
Show the shadow of its disappearance in a photograph?
This had been another good week. Now I am finally forced to look straight on and with no illusions into the absence of love, of the many infinitely small and essential ties, a look, a smile, a touch, the many and infinitely mundane essential and unsaid words that make up a bond, that make up a relationship, and a family.
There can be no tears, the kids are here to be taken care of; there has to be plenty of photographs to be taken, to rekindle the heart to life.
There are no more words for now.

I am dancing.

October 3, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

Putting your eye on the viewfinder and composing the frame, looking at your reality through the camera, focusing on what calls you, moving with the flow of what is flowing before you, finding the faces, thinking not thinking about what it means, clicking the shutter release, hearing that click sound and being in the next image before you take a new breath.
I took some pictures this week. I took some pictures with a camera, not my iPhone. I took school pictures and I took pictures of a dance rehearsal. I took some pictures and I got paid for them.
I took my kids along with me to the dance rehearsal because it was at night and there is nobody I trust to care for them and they loved to watch as the stage was being set up, the lights, the props, just like the circus they grew up in, and when the music came on Nicolas thought it was scary, and Dylan kept asking questions about how things worked, about the meaning of the dances, while I kept shooting, and it was near midnight when we went to sleep last night.
There. Profession: photographer, single mother.
I love it.
This has been a good week.

Louie.

September 25, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

This post has nothing to do with photography, other than a failure at it.
I found Louie today. Louie is a husky I adopted from the Humane Society in the spring of 2014 and then reluctantly relinquished because he ran after our cats and I was afraid he was going to kill them, being a husky.
I’ve often thought that my life started going downhill when I gave him up. The cats were killed on the street in front of our house in short order after that, my photography business felt like it was taking off but then slowed and puttered, raising the kids became excruciatingly hard, and then at the end of the year my husband left and it all came together in a mass of pain.
Louie’s eyes were piercing blue, to the point of unbearable. He was exceedingly beautiful yet I could never make a good picture of him.
I didn’t keep him long enough to develop a bond with him, just long enough to fall in love with him. Not long enough for a good picture. Two days after relinquishing him I called to see if maybe I could get him back but he was gone already, adopted on the very first day, a prize pure bred in a house of mutts.
And then there he was as the kids and I walked on campus. I wouldn’t have stopped had Dylan not asked if he could pet the dog, a usual request. There he was, Louie with the piercing blue eyes, on the very same street where I used to walk him after dropping off the kids to their music lessons during the short time he graced our lives. It made me ridiculously happy, to see him again, to see that he was well taken care of, just to see that he was.
Maybe now I can take a good picture of him, like that of Chang but with the piercing blue eyes, and my joy in them. 
Animals have that power over us, the power of grace, the power to remind us of that well of innocence creativity and wonder we all had as children, a drop of light we've long buried inside of us, smothered with our heart breaks, reality, the dirt we take on with the years, the beatings, that drop I'm after in each photograph, my holy grail, I found in Louie's piercing blue eyes.

Le déjeuner sur l'herbe.

September 19, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)
The week was uneventful, full of chores and kids stuff, work, depressing thoughts, some good news on the photography front as I started working on marketing my business again, simple steps that gave me a small morale boost and that is enough, small stuff, kids stuff, a movie in the park behind our school.
The movie was a poor excuse for entertainment, a run of the mill animation with no creativity; the art was in the field below. The scene reminded me of a Renoir painting, something in the quality of the light, the people, families laying out on blankets, just being together, the stuff of life then and now, the kids chasing each other, sunset behind the trees, a baby crying, joy. I took a picture with my phone.
Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, by Renoir, is what came to my mind.
The history of photography is filled with references to painting, and I keep finding echoes of artists I love in photographs I love, like James Nachtwey’s picture of a child crying in anguish, from his coverage of the Yugoslav wars, a mirror of The Scream, by Edvard Munch. There is a certain light in Renoir, and even though I dislike his work, I love his sense of light, and maybe because I was raised among art collectors and artists in a region, in southeastern France, favored by painters, most notably Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and Léger, I can’t help but see the world through their paintings, even the ones I don’t like.
The scene of that movie projection in the field also reminded me of another crowd scene, this summer at the Pont du Gard in another part of the South of France.
The family of man, leisure version.

Hope.

September 12, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

The opposite of sadness is not hope, but hope is what this picture I took this summer makes me feel, and it is the picture that came to my mind when I sat down to write. I don’t know why, other than another picture taken of a beach on the other side of the Mediterranean sea in a dramatically different situation was another reason to feel hope this week.
North and South, safety and stability on one side and the chaos brought about by conflicts on the other, families, friends, my boys enjoying a swim in the sea on a summer evening and migrants fleeing for their lives dying in that sea thousands of miles and a world away. Pictures can be terribly good at pulling at our emotions, or playing on them. They can also be terribly good at stirring us into positive action through those emotions, as was demonstrated last week with the picture of the little Syrian boy washed out dead on a Turkish beach. So this is the good news: that pictures still have incredible power, as acknowledged by no less than Nicolas Kristoff of The New York Times in a tweet on September 4th: “The impact of the photo of the drowned Syrian child underscores that photojournalism isn't secondary to journalism but at its very core.”

On sadness.

September 5, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

How do you photograph sadness?
It’s been a week full of doubts, like an army of pins and needles invading my thoughts, a week of difficult parenting, a week of not taking any pictures, of feeling more alone than usual. The sadness comes and goes, amid the joys and the chores, and I don’t know how to photograph it.
How does a photograph convey a feeling?
Back when I was a graduate student at the University of Missouri-Columbia’s School of Journalism’s PhotoJ sequence, photographs were a tool of journalism and photojournalism was to be objective above all else. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” - but a photograph of a pipe is a pipe and that is that.
This is not a pipe. This is not sadness, it is a photograph of my son as he wakes up, slowly, in a darkened room. This is not sadness, because sadness is not in the photograph but in the photographer’s heart - and maybe the viewer’s eye. The dogma of the PhotoJ school’s founding fathers, the cardinal rules of objectivity, observation and storytelling, the fly on the wall approach to being a photographer, the unbiased, impartial and obsessively objective witness to life’s travails, big and small, was what we strove for all those twenty-or-so years ago, our gold standard, and yet even then it was debated and deconstructed and I belonged to those who thought it was all a lot more complicated than that, Roland Barthes and all, and that objectivity could hide emotion and opinion and intimate vision, and that it always did, in fact.
The photographs of The Hunt, Visura grant’s winning story, make up a reportage on hunting in an unforgiving environment, yes, but they are also, they are most of all an intimate and subjective portrait of unbearable beauty and poetry.
As I strive to redefine my life as a single mother and photographer amid sadness and mundane challenges, I am reminded that photography is how I go through the world but that is could also be my salvation, the way out of sadness and into the light.

Families.

August 29, 2015, Columbia, (Missouri.)
 
I never thought I’d have a broken family. I never imagined I’d have a family at all.
A photographer I only dreamed of being, and by that I mean someone who makes a living taking pictures and is recognized for it. And that, incredibly, I was, I was a news photographer in a small, vibrant and wonderful daily, The Journal-Courier, in Jacksonville, Illinois (it has since done away with photographers altogether,) and in a big metro paper, The Press-Enterprise, in Riverside, California (which had seventeen staffers when I worked there and now has four,) I entered the National Photographers Association’s contest and sometimes I won, I went to faraway places on assignment,sometimes, and I went down the street a lot, where there were many destinies and many faces, each telling, and I loved it. Now I’m picking up the pieces of a broken family and a stuttering career.
Some days it’s easy, like yesterday, when I was honored to be featured on the World Photography Organisation’s blog, allowing wide exposure to my work and a sense of achievement. Most days it’s hard, as the phone doesn’t ring and the work sits unpublished and I feel myself slipping in a dark hole of buried hopes, my friends far away on the road or around the world, the fruits of a life of wandering.
When I get down I like to look at the pictures I took of some of my friends, pictures from the circus, from my project, The Mudshow Diaries. Rebecca is one of my those friends and taking her picture used to be one of my favorite things to do.
It was the last year I traveled with the circus. I took portraits of its families.
There were various working on the show that year, as always, our circus a small traveling village with its school, its cafeteria, its rivalries, its hierarchies, its petty rancors and its gorgeous darings. The Mosses, the Browns, the Perez, the Fuscos, the Loyals, mine, and Rebecca’s.
Rebecca is an aerialist, a wife and a mother, the quintessential performer. One day in the fall of 2012 she asked me to take a picture of her family in wardrobe, a souvenir. It had to be quick; circus performers dash from one act to another during shows, and to get every member of one family to sit down for a photograph at the same in wardrobe and makeup is almost impossible. Their home was a mess - circus performers’ homes are a mess because there is no space and that space is both home and backstage, full of open makeup cases among the remnants of lunch, piles of dusty shoes and the dog’s hair.
This is the picture that I took, that day near Chicago during intermission and before dinner.

Profession: single mother, photographer.

August 22, 2015, Columbia (Missouri.)

The story went like this.
It's about us.
It's about a small circus traveling around the country gathering memories.
It's called The Mudshow Diaries.
It's about making sure my kids stay away from the elephants, trying to find a laundromat in a strange town, documenting a world built around blood ties, and sweat: A diary kept over ten years of traveling with a circus in America became a journey in motherhood and photography, along with an odyssey into the country's forgotten paths and the circus' hidden world.   Along the way it also became a journey in belonging - in discovering my family in a fleeting cast, reluctantly, and of finding acceptance, slowly, in this close-knit family that is the circus - love unfurled by tenuous chance, as on a tightrope.
That was before.
Now I'm a single mother before I am a photographer, and the circus is far away.
This is a weekly blog about my journey as a single mother and as a photographer, forging ahead with joy and tears, and absolutely no regrets, to redefine my life.
It's about paying the bills, drying up tears and scrapes, going to ball practice, and sometimes, all the time, or is it ever anymore - the longing to be in Europe to document the refugee crisis, or simply to photograph the faces of recent immigrants here in Columbia, Missouri, where I live - it's about taking pictures of it all because photography is what I do, it is how I breathe, my way through the world.
But now it's Saturday and Saturdays are laundry days.
I'll take a picture of that.