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.