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 Most days it’s hard, as the phone doesn’t ring and the work sits unpublished and I feel myself slipping in a dark hole of buried hopes, my friends far away on the road or around the world, the fruits of a life of wandering.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.