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.